September 17, 2012

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com Your Universe Online

Got a few of those old school Nokia 5120 phones lying around? Try depositing them inside an ecoATM kiosk and see if you cant get at least some parking meter change out of it.

A new artificial intelligence system is able to differentiate various consumer electronics products and determine a market value, then exchange some cash for the product.

Users will be able to walk up to the ecoATM kiosks and accept either cash or store credit for the value the machine gives them.

The ecoATM helps to find second homes for three-fourths of the phones it collects, sending the remaining ones to environmentally responsible recycling channels to reclaim any rare earth elements and keep toxic components from landfills.

The basic technologies of machine vision, artificial intelligence and robotics that we use have existed for many years, but none have been applied to the particular problem of consumer recycling, ecoATM co-founder and NSF principal investigator Mark Bowles said in a statement. But weve done much more than just apply existing technology to an old problemwe developed significant innovations for each of those basic elements to make the system commercially viable.

The ecoATM system began as a wood-box prototype that required a representative to ensure that users were being honest about their trades.

With funding from the NSF Small Business Innovation Research grant, researchers were able to develop artificial intelligence and diagnostics that delivered 97.5% accuracy for device recognition, allowing the ecoATMs to operate unsupervised.

Bowles said traditional machine vision relies on pattern matching, which is pairing a new image to a known one. This approach isnt useful for the ecoATMs evaluation process, which includes eight separate grades based on a devices level of damage.

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Smartphone ATMs Purchase And Exchange Old Devices