At an office in San Francisco, if you drop a coffee cup in a robotic waste bin¹, the machine will automatically sort the cup for recycling.

在旧金山的一间办公室里，如果你把咖啡杯扔进机器人垃圾箱里，它就会自动把杯子分到可回收垃圾里。

The office is one of the first to use the technology, called TrashBot, from a startup called CleanRobotics that is trying to solve a fundamental challenge in recycling: Even when someone is diligently² trying to reduce waste, there's a good chance they're recycling wrong.

这间办公室是第一批使用TrashBot（智能垃圾分类机器人）技术的，它是初创公司CleanRobotics的产品，旨在解决回收中最基本的问题：即使一个人想尽量减少浪费，但他们也很有可能回收错。

"The idea was really born out of frustration," says Charles Yhap, cofounder and CEO of CleanRobotics, which is a semifinalist in the current IBM Watson AI XPRIZE.

CleanRobotics公司进入了本届IBM沃森人工智能XPRIZE竞赛的半决赛，联合创始人兼首席执行官Charles Yhap说：“这个想法真的是无奈之举。”

He points to the example of a store like Whole Foods, where anyone who eats at the salad bar then has to figure out which bin to use for their fork and box and cup.

他以Whole Foods（一家美国超市）这样的商家为例，在那里的沙拉吧就餐的人需要弄清楚他们的叉子、盒子和杯子要扔进哪个垃圾箱。

"I'll eat my food and I go to throw something away and I'm confronted with an array of waste bins³, and it's just so confusing—everywhere you go, the rules are slightly different, and I'm still not sure that I'm doing it correctly."

“我吃完东西去扔垃圾时，面前有一排垃圾箱，我就懵了。你去的所有地方分类规则都会有差异，我都不确定我扔得对不对。”

He thought that technology could help. "We started looking at the diminishing costs of sensors⁴ and robotic components⁵ and the increasing accessibility of algorithms and AI systems and we thought, maybe we can build something that does this better than people," he says.

他认为这项技术会有所帮助。他说：“我们先是发现传感器和机器人部件成本下降，算法和人工智能系统的可达性提高，所以我们认为可以做出在垃圾分类方面比人类做得好的产品。”

It helped that current bins are already expensive—a single set in an airport might cost $1,200. "These are just shiny metal tubes that don't do anything for you. So we thought we could build a robot that is price competitive and adds a ton more value."

对我们有利的是现在垃圾桶都很贵，飞机场的一套垃圾桶就要1,200美元。“那些只是有光泽的金属桶，什么都做不了。所以我们想我们能做出一个机器人，价位合适，而且用处很大。”