Veolia has unveiled a new robotic arm at its Southwark Integrated Waste Management Facility (IWMF) to optimise operations and make recycling more effective.
The UK resource management company and AI robotics business Recycleye have installed an AI-driven robotic arm that Veolia said is as “accurate as the human eye”.
The robot is being used at Veolia Southwark IWMF to pick out paper, card, mixed plastics and beverage cartons, which often contain some aluminium layers, from the aluminium line leaving just pure aluminium items for recycling.
The robot features a camera, a 6-axis robotic arm, a pneumatics system and a compute box.
It “picks” the items using compressed air and a silicon gripper. Once the item is secured, the robot twists to face the correct sorting bin location and blows the item off the gripper and into the bin.
The robot will pick between 35 and 50 items per minute, Veolia said. As the objects pass along the belt, they are scanned and recorded, and the data is uploaded to the cloud.
Read the entire article here: https://www.circularonline.co.uk/news/veolia-installs-ai-driven-robotic-arm-to-increase-recycling/
