Order Lego pieces is part of the game unless you have in your collection kilos and kilos of these small plastic bricks. Then this task becomes an almost impossible mission. This has happened to Jacques Mattheij, who has developed, thanks to artificial intelligence, a machine capable of ordering and selecting parts by shape and color.
Raise your hand who has not fiddled at some point in his life with a Layman. We all have a family member or friend who is a fan of these plastic bricks. These color blocks already outnumber humans in numbers. It is estimated that there 100 pieces Lego for every man, woman and child.
These toys, not only for the little ones, are the perfect element to unleash creativity. Lego has that point of fun that allows anyone to let their imagination run wild and bring out the artist we all have inside. It supports from simple creations to sophisticated constructions. Today, it is the most powerful toy brand on the planet.
Lego represents a mixture between passion and obsession. If not to tell the lovers of these pieces who visit every year the coast of Cornwall, in the United Kingdom, since in 1997 they fell from the Tokyo Express, due to the storm, 62 containers one of them loaded with 4.8 million lego bricks.
Artificial Intelligence at the service of the game
If you have a bucket full of these pieces, even if they look like a lot of scrambles, it may not be necessary to spend more than five minutes separating them and sorting them by shape, size or color. But what if it happens to you like Jacques Mattheij? This Dutch citizen passionate about technology and number one fan of Lego since the age of six has developed a system based on artificial intelligence capable of separate large quantities of Lego pieces. We talk about kilos and kilos of these little feet, even Lego bathtubs, a very common measure in the purchase and sale online of these mini plastic bricks.
In 2015 Mattheij realized that with all the Lego pieces he had he had formed a nice collection, but that a machine would be needed to order and select all those pieces. He soon realized that on the Internet there was a large market for selling and exchanging parts and saw the opportunity: develop machinery capable of sorting and separating large quantities of these pieces, going through artificial intelligence.
For a Lego enthusiast separating pieces is more entertainmentit’s even part of the game. But the thing changes when you dedicate yourself, in a professional way, to search and exchange concrete pieces. Then the game changes and becomes a tedious task in which to separate thousands of pieces from a huge mass of objects.
Source: Youtube
Lego automatic sorter
Mattheij bought pieces and pieces of Lego to fill the equivalent of a room. Piles of stacked boxes I wanted to order and that if not for this automatic sorter it would take years.
In addition, the problem with lots purchased online is that many contain pieces that are not in perfect condition, fake, dirty or that do not correspond to the others. It was then that this passionate Lego decided to undertake the project of building this machinery in the garage of his house.
The automatic system it is equipped with a conveyor belt with a camera connected to the computer and that is able to recognize all the pieces that pass. Mattheij checked that there are 38,000 different shapes and more than 100 colors. The pieces move along the gangway and are classified according to the parameters established in the program created for this work.
Perhaps this machine is very far from its final version, since especially at the level of space and technique can be improved, but, for the moment, this large-scale gadget is precise and accepts kilos and kilos of Lego.
