Every day there is an accumulation formed from tons of waste from various industries, households, hospitals, construction, and demolition sites, etc. We have numerous methods to get rid of the accumulated waste, but it still ends up affecting the safety, balance, and sustainability of the ecological system. And, the best alternative for this is to reuse and recycle as much waste as possible. And we use robotics in offering an extra pair of hands for this in form of waste sorting and recycling robots.
Robotics and automation have seeped through every industrial sector. Now robots are rapidly stepping into the recycling industry too. Robots are capable of multitasking and have a highly integrated learning system that can function tirelessly 24/7. This implies that robots can be deployed extensively for waste processing and recycling in industries. These recycling robots are fast, they have got a high number of picks per hour and can work in different shifts with the same accuracy.
The Pioneers
ZenRobotics in 2011 ventured the idea of automated waste management with help of their robotic waste sorter. The company’s system used robotic arms supported with the help of conveyor belts. This system was developed with a combination of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and computer vision to run synchronized robotic arms to sort and pick recycled materials from moving conveyor belts.
AMP Robotics’s Clarke
In the US, the first waste sorting robot named Clarke was installed in 2016, by AMP. Clarke leverages AI software (AMP Neuron platform) to distinguish between a wide variety of food and beverage cartons so that it can grab and separate them from the rest of the recycling. By the following year, Clarke had improvised its recycling skills by grabbing almost 60 cartons per minute with near-perfect accuracy.
MIT ROCycle
The trend of recycling robots continues to build. The process is a combined effort of researchers bridging mechanical, and laser-optical techniques to achieve this end goal. The inspiration behind ROCycle was born out to find a solution for the human workers sorting through rubbish on dirty and, often, unsafe conveyor belts. As per official sources of MIT, ROCycle has an 85 percent success rate when objects are stationary.
Current Market
Today the companies are moving with impressive speed toward improving capabilities, deploying machinery, and boosting revenue. These robots shall be used across numerous materials recovery facilities.
Apple’s Dave and Daisy
Meanwhile, the recycling robots are not only concentrated on being Omni functional, some are also deployed at disassembly lines and manufacturing industries too. For, e.g., Apple’s Dave and Daisy. Dave is a new robot recycler announced this year, while Daisy is a disassembly robot that launched in April 2018.
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