Translation: we took the fun part out if building Lego and gave it to a machine...
Seriously, though, I have a real-world problem which needs a solution: given the roughly 3000 loose bricks in my son's Lego collection, tell me which ones go with which sets? Thank you - we can take it from here.
It probably can be done, if someone hasn't already done it; put the bricks in a bin that pulls it through a conveyor belt, which uses image recognition to determine color + shape, matching that up with known lego pieces. And the list of parts for every set is stored online somewhere as well.
The difficulty is that some bricks will look like other bricks, close enough that the image recognition might be accurate. But, some margin for error is fine.
I did see a sorting project somewhere, with image recognition. Apparently there is money to be made buying old Lego collections and selling sorted. Just the part where it puts the sets together was missing. If I had the time..
I was involved in a small group of poeple looking into creating a commercial LEGO sorting machine, which you would feed buckets of bricks, and they would come out sorted and indexed on the other side (in boxes).
We moth-balled it, because it would not be possible to make it at a pricepoint, which made commercial sense.
rebrickable.com is intended for finding new things to build with your existing sets/bricks, but as a consequence of that, it has a searchable database of which bricks shipped with which sets.
Seriously, though, I have a real-world problem which needs a solution: given the roughly 3000 loose bricks in my son's Lego collection, tell me which ones go with which sets? Thank you - we can take it from here.