Why Robots? Data-Driven Manipulation for the World’s Hardest Sorting Problem

Guest lecture in Stefanie Tellex’s class at Brown University on robotic manipulation for landfill restoration. The talk covered multimodal sensing (force, audio, spectroscopic), the capability gap between warehouse robots and unstructured-environment robots, and why landfill sorting may be the hardest data collection problem in robotics.

Thanks to Stefanie for the invitation!