FANUC’s Innovative System of the Year Award - Waste Robotics Autonomous recycling

FANUC’s Innovative System of the Year Award highlights the utilization of robotic automation and technology - not necessarily robot volume. Innovation can center upon the FANUC automation process, application, or a non-traditional manufacturing industry. Waste Robotics Autonomous recycling Waste Robotics Autonomous Recycling (WAR) technology integrates advanced waste handling processes, computer vision, deep learning algorithms and state-of-the-art robotic technologies to enable smaller, more precise, safer and more profitable waste recycling facilities. Recyclable waste sorting is mostly performed by manual labor in dull, dirty and dangerous environments. There are less and less people willing to perform these tasks and more and more recycling to be processed. A task like this is ideal for automation, but the challenge of recognizing and extracting random looking objects in a random stream of waste is very difficult. Newly available Artificial intelligence (AI) now enables these complex applications. Current systems have limited recognition and extraction technologies that limit the quality of sorted material. Waste Robotics has developed a computer vision system that enables real-time recognition of objects in a random stream while dispatching robot commands to perform efficient and high-quality sorting to enable a circular economy.