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They call this the wooden
house district of Helsinki.
These beauties were built back in the early 1900s
so that the workers of Finland
could have nice places to live
and nice gardens to tend.
They're symbolic of Finland's famed
social support system that has made Finns
some of the happiest people on Earth.
Bless you, Finland, and your wheelbarrow gardens.
Of course, progress often has its own plans.
The workers here, for example, have been
replaced by artsy hipsters
seeking a trendy neighborhood.
And, soon enough, workers and hipsters all over the world
might be replaced by robots that don't care
about social systems or pretty gardens at all.
Hello robot overlords.
Here at Helsinki's most scenic garbage dump
are some hard-working robotic arms
from a company called ZenRobotics.
The Zen part obviously being some bizarre marketing ploy
because there's nothing calming about these things.
Their mission is to divvy up industrial trash,
sorting things like wood and metal into their own piles.
How do you get the robot to see that it's not wood,
that it's a piece of steel, a plastic bag?
All this stuff is so amorphous and different.
We use cameras, we use metal detectors,
we use 3D sensors, and we use also near infrared sensors.
The A.I. is able then to predict, okay,
what kind of material?
We tried to understand how is a human operator
sorting waste, and he is not picking it
and putting it here.
It picks and throws.
Yeah.
And we simulated the same movements,
so our robot opens the grip and lets the object fly.
And what do we know about
how accurate the robots are?
Depending on the different kind of waste,
we can go to a purity up to 90%.
Can we go take a closer look at the robots?
Yes, for sure, yes, let's go.
So, the waste comes up, goes on this conveyor belt,
and then this is where it's getting scanned--
Yes.
And then in this moment where it's getting scanned,
it's telling the robots down the line,
there's gonna be an object coming that I want you to grab.
Yes.
And then the arms start to go to work.
Yes.
The robot gets to pick which waste
and to throw it in which bin.
I mean, it does a really good job to me
of picking up these objects that are such different sizes.
Yep.
You can believe there are many man hours invested
to really develop a gripper, what is
able to grip totally different kind of sizes,
shapes and waste.
And I think that was one of the biggest challenges.
ZenRobotics recently put its robots
to work right here in the heart of Silicon Valley
at this massive garbage processing facility in San Jose.
Artificial Intelligence and trash
commingling in harmony.
Just the way nature intended.
Back in Finland, I took a drive from the dump to Espoo.
It's a city about 25 minutes outside of Helsinki
that is something of a tech suburb.
Nokia's once glorious headquarters are here,
and so too are its more sedate current headquarters.
And the Angry Birds are here too.
But I have not come to Espoo for disgruntled birds
or airborne pigs.
I have come to see some satellites.
This is the headquarters of Iceye.
It is one of a handful of start-ups that have built small
satellites that take constant pictures
of what's happening on Earth.
How many satellites have you guys put up today?
The commercial constellation that we operate right now
is three satellites.
Three satellites.
And then, your satellites, they're mini fridge sized?
The famous mini fridge, yeah!
And then you also want to try and surround
the earth with dozens, hundreds of these things?
Right, yeah.
So, we really want to make the system,
that allows you to sort of reliably, and accurately,
and objectively see everything at all times.
It's almost like having a sort of a MRI scan
for the earth.
Iceye satellites travel from pole to pole
every 45 minutes.
Rather than cameras, their three small sats
use something called synthetic aperture radar,
or SAR, to pound the earth with microwave signals
from low earth orbit.
They then use signals that are reflected back
from the earth to build images of the surface.
Unlike cameras, SAR can see through the cloudiest of days
and the darkest of nights.
Iceye combine this radar technology
with advanced image processing and computer vision
software to create highly detailed pictures.
Can we peak at some of these images, and--
Sure.
Walk through what you guys do?
So, this was an example of the hurricane Dorian,
in the Bahamas.
We were able to image this exactly when
the hurricane was on top of the island.
This is the island as it normally is.
And then, in the afterwards,
the land border used to be here.
And I think here, the really dramatic thing is that
all of these red dots are buildings fully submerged.
This is exactly what becomes insurance information to--
Yeah, so, you have proof that all
of this stuff flooded, and--
Yeah.
And proof is one thing, and then, of course,
just the ability to react.
Like, now what if you could trigger the payment
to these guys automatically?
So that people get to rebuild their lives,
and so forth.
Much more quickly, yeah, yeah.
Now here, we're looking at a large tanker, The Grace One.
It relates to the sanctions to Iran.
It became this big story, when it was impounded
in Gibraltar, when it was said that it was headed
towards Syria, with a tank full of Iranian oil.
This is an image from a while back
where we're able to see the Grace One ship here,
in the Iranian shores in January.
So, maybe the US knows where this tanker is.
The NSA knows, the CIA.
And they can choose to make public what they want.
But, basically, with you guys, there's a democratization
to all this, where anyone who's willing to pay
for your imagery, you know?
Yeah.
It's not just in the hands of these few governments now.
It's like everybody can know what's going on.
Yeah, I think that's part of the big story here.
In the case of this tanker, what was really interesting is,
was it full or was it not full?
How full was it? And so forth.
If it's full of oil, it's down in the water,
and you're getting something on the depth,
from like a shadow off the water, or something like that.
Yeah, exactly like this.
And then this is a mine, it's an open pit mine.
So, the more mundane use case here is just that
you monitor the progress of the mining activity.
But, of course, the safety of, is there some
displacement that is likely to cause landslides?
Or, is there some underground mining that
is likely to cause collapses?
When it started in 2014,
Iceye was the very first company
to build a commercial satellite in Finland.
Since then, it's raised more than 65 million dollars
from investors and plans to launch a constellation
of 18 small satellites in the next couple of years.
Right now, we're fully booked with customers.
So, there will be some governments.
There will be some insurance, some finance.
I mean, there's a ton of positive use cases
to all this stuff.
I do think some people, though, would be creeped out a bit,