APR 21

Currently, about 100 percent of construction waste ends up in landfills, although much of it could be recycled or reused.  A Finnish robotics company called ZenRobotics wants to change that.  It has created a robot to sort through construction waste and find recyclable material and deposit it in appropriate bins.

The robot is essentially an arm with a gripper on the end that's connected to a computer that provides metal detection, weight measurements, 3-D scanning, tactile feedback and spectrometer analysis to identify and sort the materials.  The robot is stationed by a conveyor belt where the materials are loaded.  As the material goes by, the robot picks it up, analyzes it and if the robot identifies the type, places it in the appropriate nearby bin.  If material isn't recognized, it keeps traveling on the belt and is deemed trash.

So far, the robot can correctly identify about half of the material it goes through, but there is huge potential for improvement as new measuring technology becomes available.

The robot is a breakthrough for both recycling and robotics because before now, most robots have been limited to basic, repetitive tasks, but this new robot is being asked to analyze and recognize materials and learn as it goes.

via PhysOrg

Comments (6)

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100 percent?!?
written by Andreas Beer, April 21, 2011

Maybe in your country. I live in germany and there's a construction site behind our house right now, and the digger driver meticulously sorts out all the recyclable materials that come down with the old building, sorting wooden frames, aluminium, steel radiators, etc.
This is pure money, any demolition contractor with some sort of sense for making profit should do that all the time. You don't need robot for common sense and a few minutes extra work.

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the robot
written by Mariah, April 22, 2011

Judgment Day is Coming!!!

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Another Use
written by RwFlynn, April 22, 2011

This sounds like it could be very useful for recycling plants which get a lot of unsorted rubbish.

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...not 100%
written by Carl, April 22, 2011

County of San Diego requires contractors to recycle at least metal materials prior to dumping into landfill...

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Recycling Building Waste in the UK
written by Richard Environment, April 24, 2011

In the UK, innovation drives solutions and there are a number of start-ups driven by novel recycling ideas for building waste. We already have skip hire companies that deliver 3-5 skips, one for each type of building waste (wood, bricks, rubble, plastics, metals). There are a number of skip hire companies that have on-site crushers for turning building rubble into hardcore. While the robot is extremely novel, by the time it's a viable option, numerous businesses will have jumped on the "sorting construction"waste bandwagon, driving down costs through competition to such a level that owning a robot to do the work may nt be a viable option due to overheads. Besides, in the UK, gypsum plasterboard is already banned from landfill and reclamined building yards are in just about every city.

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No need for robots
written by Asaf Shalgi, May 14, 2011

With Global Energie's KDV technology, there's no need for a robot to seperate the waste since our company takes virtually every kind of waste and makes mineral diesel from it.

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