I think there’s some university-publicity-office dynamics here where the OP ends up making silly claims about real world applications. I think the article is much more ‘here is research we did in controlling a robotic arm with neural networks, in real-time, in the real world’ than ‘we think this is the best way to sort waste’.
I think this is like you read some university press release about some research into a weird graph theory algorithm and explained that social networks have been available for decades and their approach isn’t relevant there.
Yes, that's a huge problem with university publicity offices. I've made the comment on some battery announcements that it's either Nobel Prize material or total bullshit.
The big insight seems to be that you need some robots, but most of the job can be done by simple machines that use gravity, air jets, screens, and magnets. The robots just pull out stuff that wasn't properly sorted by brute-force means. The robotics enthusiasts wanted to do everything with robots, which is not cost effective, and the heavy-machinery people tried to adapt techniques from ore mining to recycling. It turns out that a combination of those approaches, plus the air-jet optical sorter technology used for fruit and vegetable sorting, can do the whole job in a cost-effective way.
I think this is like you read some university press release about some research into a weird graph theory algorithm and explained that social networks have been available for decades and their approach isn’t relevant there.
The waste sorting systems are interesting.