In the latest issue (Sep., vol. 25 #9) of Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics, a Chinese-centric journal hosted by a US site:
Tang, Y. Jiang, Y. Zhang, Z. et al. NEA Detection Method with Neural Network in Sidereal Tracking 095003 ade491
There are 1.4 billion Chinese. It’s farfetched to think none of them- not a single one- will come up with a good idea. Again: 1.4 billion Chinese; it’s farfetched to think they can’t build a fair-sized telescope, and search for asteroids. Taxing every Chinese person one cent would have funded the baseline ATLAS telescope pair. Easily. Of course, not everyone is a taxpayer, but… charging able-bodied Chinese ~5 cents each (and it doesn’t have to be in a single year) would have funded Pan-STARRS.
But back to ‘a good idea’- let’s consider one prospect. Tang et al. take their existing sky search database, and throw multiple approaches at it to identify asteroids. Some are clearly Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning; some are ‘just’ algorithms (no serious intelligence in it per se), and some are just diligent use of an astronomical instrument by experienced observers. In any case, their image parsing doesn’t take unusual CPU time, so why not?
The construction and use of search telescopes is not some burden on society. Nations of the world choose to set aside pennies per head to survey the skies. China is yet another such nation, and the asteroid databases dutifully log Chinese or British or Czech or private (!) asteroid discoveries.