还在犯愁垃圾分类？深圳小学生发明“智能垃圾桶”帮大忙！

Seven Grade 3 students from Shenzhen invented a set of intelligent garbage-sorting bins that can help residents classify garbage by saying the type of the trash to an app.

The group of students, who are from SUSTech Experimental Education Group (Nanshan) No. 1 Primary school, has received a patent for the invention issued by the National Intellectual Property Administration.

The idea to create a set of intelligent garbage-sorting bins first came up during a club discussion led by Ge Fangfang, the teacher in charge of a club called the Zhongke Innovation Lab. The lab establishes a curriculum co-designed by many institutions that promotes students’ innovative analysis and problem-solving skills.

Ren Bocheng, one of the students who created the bins, came up with the idea for the invention when he noticed the smelly trash bins in the housing estate where he lives. Ren thought the arrangement of recyclable or non-recyclable bins was not effective at sorting garbage, which led him to think of letting the garbage sort itself.

Initially, the students wanted to sort garbage using infrared rays. According to their original design, a bag of garbage would be thrown inside the bin and the rays would automatically identify the different types of trash, which would then be delivered to different locations. However, this design was too difficult to realize, so the students decided to create four bins to sort trash.

According to Ren, his group members classified garbage into four types, namely recyclable garbage, food waste, hazardous waste and others, after conducting research and sorting household garbage at home for a week.

Guo Jinping, another member of the group, said the team tried many methods, including shape and color recognition, to sort garbage, but these failed.

Under the teacher’s inspiration, they ultimately decided to use speech recognition and established a database for garbage names.

In the new design, every bin will have a chip that receives signals. When people say the name of the garbage to an app, the system in the app will classify the trash as a certain type. Then the lid of the bin for that type of trash will open while the lids of other bins remain closed.

The students have already set up three languages, namely Mandarin, Cantonese and English, for the speech recognition instructions after considering language diversity.

As the idea took shape, the students started to create the set for intelligent garbage-sorting. According to Liu Zirui, one of the group members, the team finished designing and creating the bins in a month.

According to Ge, the team is currently improving the app in hopes of creating a shared database for garbage names. They hope users will upload the latest information onto the app and adjust the standards of garbage sorting according to different cities (Liu Wenjin)