Robot manufacturer FANUC and intelligent waste management start-up Recycleye are together supporting UN Sustainability Goal No 11 (Sustainable Cities) by deploying modular robotic picking systems to material recovery facilities.

The robotic picking system helps improve the efficiency of sorting at the facilities and ensures meeting higher purity standards. To date, the limited availability of scalable recognition technologies has pushed the waste management industry towards a reliance on manual waste pickers to identify and extract high value materials. Together, FANUC and Recycleye have addressed this issue by delivering intelligent automation to the industry, combining Recycleye’s validated AI computer vision technology with FANUC’s 60+ years of experience in automation.

Recycleye Robotics performs the physical tasks of identifying, picking and placing material, at a rate of 55 successful picks per minute. The novel solution automates current manual operations and enables facilities to double their total throughput. FANUC’s team of expert automation engineers designed Recycleye Robotics to weigh 75 percent less than any existing robotic waste picker currently in the market. The plug-and-play installation eliminates traditional expensive retrofit costs.

Recycleye Robotics is powered by Recycleye Vision, an AI vision system, which has been deployed across the UK and French markets, exceeding human vision in identifying and classifying all items on waste streams – by material, object and even brand. Recycleye Vision works to constantly train and learn new object detection, enabling for the robotic waste picking system to adapt to changing waste composition without any need for manual upgrades.