Australian builds universal Lego sorting machine with artificial intelligence

Sorting Lego bricks is not exactly the most fun part of a new construction project. Australian Daniel West was fed up with it and developed a Lego sorting machine. Through artificial intelligence, the device recognizes and sorts almost every piece ever made.

Daniel West worked on his “universal Lego sorting machine” for over two years. According to him, by applying artificial intelligence, the machine can recognize and sort almost any Lego part, provided that a 3D model is available. The only exceptions are pieces that are too large for the machine, certain flexible and therefore difficult to recognize parts, and blocks that are not included in the LDraw.org Parts Library.

A YouTube video shows West tipping a container of Lego blocks into a large funnel on top of the sorting machine. The pieces are then loaded into the machine via a conveyor belt and then neatly sorted into up to eighteen different smaller compartments.

The heart of the sorting machine, which itself consists of more than ten thousand Lego pieces, is a Raspberry Pi computer. Each block is analyzed via a small camera, after which the system searches for a match in the LDraw.org and The Rebrickable databases. The sorting machine is assisted by a more powerful laptop on which a neural network runs, more specifically the open source machine learning platform TensorFlow.

For those who want to know more details about the sorting machine’s artificial intelligence, Daniel West posted a second YouTube video online.