Trash Sorter
A robotic trash-sorting prototype built as an initial hands-on learning experience with a LeRobot arm at the Founders Inc Physical AI Hack World Tour SF hackathon.
Trash Sorter was a weekend robotic trash-sorting prototype built at the Founders Inc Physical AI Hack World Tour SF hackathon on May 9-10, 2026. The project was an initial learning experience with the LeRobot arm: calibration, teleoperation, camera-to-world intuition, grasp setup, and the practical difference between a software plan and a physical motion that actually lands.
I worked on it with Kareem Dasilva, Connor, and Tiffany Prentice at the Founders Inc Physical AI hackathon. The event brought together builders around MakerMods' open hardware stack, XLeRobot kits, Hugging Face LeRobot, modular robotics components, and real demo constraints.
Project
The prototype explored a simple value-generating robotics workflow: identify trash, pick it up, and sort it into the right place. The task looks straightforward at the symbolic level, but it quickly turns into the harder robotics loop: calibrate the arm, stabilize the workspace, make perception actionable, tune the grasp, and shorten the human-in-the-loop correction cycle.
For me, the main lesson was that robotics exposes a much higher-dimensional slice of reality than ordinary agentic software. The same engineering principles still apply, but the iteration cost is higher because the system has to bring predictability to lighting, geometry, latency, contact, and calibration before autonomy can compound.
Takeaways
- Calibration speed dominated the early workflow.
- Teleoperation and quick physical feedback mattered more than elaborate planning.
- Useful autonomy depended on getting the environment into a predictable enough state.
- The experience directly informed later work on Chem-0's robot-arm control, camera feedback, and event-grounded physical measurement loop.
Social Thread
Context
Neighborhood