AMP Cortex™: AI-powered automation technology for identifying and recovering recyclables
Country of development/application:
USA
Scope of innovation
☐ Office work
☒ Production / Service supply process
Sector-specific
☒ Yes / please, specify sector(s): packaging supply solutions, recycling companies, waste management plants, etc.
☐ No (relevant for all sectors)
Description of the needs
The global recycling industry has faced economic crisis since China and other international importers of recyclables enacted stricter requirements on the purity of materials destined for recycling. COVID-19 exacerbated these challenges, forcing many businesses to suspend operations due to concerns for worker safety. At the same time, the pandemic increased demand for high-quality recycled feedstock to overcome supply chain interruptions and shifts in raw material availability.
AMP Robotics’ intelligent automation is helping the industry overcome these challenges by modernizing recycling – keeping businesses running, ensuring worker safety, increasing productivity, improving bale purity, overcoming labor shortages, lowering the costs to recycle, diverting materials from landfill, and increasing overall rates of recycling and resource recovery.
The company’s technology is helping to provide a sustainable workforce for recycling jobs that have been chronically hard to fill. It is keeping an essential public service running and local businesses operating, while retaining and creating new jobs in manufacturing and other areas of the recycling industry.
Recycling advances a more circular economy by addressing the burgeoning issue of waste and pollution and keeping products and materials in use. AMP Robotics is shifting the focus beyond what’s recyclable to what actually gets recycled. In addition to the environmental benefits of an effective recycling system, recycling produces the raw material required for the manufacture of a wide range of products and packaging. The recycling infrastructure safeguards the continuity and vitality of the global supply chain.
Description of the solution
Just because something is recyclable doesn’t mean it’s recycled. AMP Robotics is changing that with their application of artificial intelligence (AI) to identify and recover recyclables with rates of speed and precision previously unknown to the industry. By digitizing billions upon billions of images, the technology captures data on a vast array of material, packaging, and container types. And then, it automates the recovery of even the hardest-to-recycle materials, aiding society’s path to a circular economy.
The AI platform of AMP Robotics – the AMP Neuron™ technology, uses computer vision to recognize patterns of specific recyclable materials within a complex waste stream of smashed, folded, and tattered objects – all combined together. Neuron distinguishes different plastic polymers, types of paper, metal containers, and multilayered packages to characterize what’s in the recycling stream and what needs to be sorted during different process stages. Neuron then guides robots to sort and recover what material to recycle or contamination to be removed.
How does it work? Artificial intelligence is a series of algorithms based on the human brain, that enable a computer to learn broad skills from experience and repetition. Neuron processes images of recyclable materials, digitizing pixels into data, and classifying this data into hundreds of categories by material type, color, form, and other characteristics. Neuron uses machine learning (ML) to continuously improve its ability to recognize materials. As AMP Robotics’ fleet of automation continuously grows across the globe, the AI exponentially increases its ability to learn from data collected from different locations, growing smarter and more effective every day.
Other technologies integrate with the AI-powered automation for identifying and recovering recyclables:
• AMP Vision™: improving visibility on the recycling lines
AMP Vision™ is a modular computer vision system that can be dropped in to key stages of operation. The material flow can be understood from inbound processing to bale QC to the end of the line. Integrated with the AMP Clarity™ data portal, AMP Vision™ provides real-time material characterization and performance measurement. The user can apply his knowledge to see where he can increase productivity, improve material capture, and take action to prevent lost revenue and improve the value of his bales for resale.
Benefits of AMP Vision™:
– Monitor: monitoring lines to gain insights and take action.
– Audit: creating isolated waste audits.
– Drop-in: modular design that is virtually anywhere on the material recovery lines.
– High-definition: high-resolution images of the material stream.
• AMP Cortex™: an AI-powered robotic sorting system
AMP Cortex™ is a high-speed robotic sorting system guided by AMP’s groundbreaking artificial intelligence technology. The robots intelligently perform physical tasks of sorting, picking, and placing material to achieve up to 99% accuracy and up to 80 picks per minute.
Benefits of AMP Cortex™:
– Labor: reduce time and money spent on high-turnover positions.
– Safety: increase facility safety and reduce training overhead.
– Material recovery: capture more high-value material and boost bottom line.
– Contamination: decrease bale contamination and improve quality.
• AMP Vortex™: AI-powered film contamination removal
AMP Vortex™ is the waste & recycling industry’s first automated AI solution.
Benefits of AMP Vortex™:
– Improve operational efficiency: keep tangling film out of downstream equipment and increase the sorting efficiency and safety of lines.
– Optimize workforce: automate high-volume capture of film to allow your sorters to focus on recovering key commodities.
– Retrofit existing lines: vortex is designed as a modular drop-in solution and can be installed over various conveyors including high speed and angled.
– Drive decisions with data: gain the rich material data needed to understand the levels of film contamination and make operational adjustments.
• AMP Clarity™: real-time recycling data and insights
AMP Clarity™ is a web-based data portal that provides real-time material characterization and performance measurement throughout key process stages of user’s sorting operations. He can understand material flow from inbound processing to bale QC to the end of the line. AMP Cortex™ fleet can be commanded and the sorting performance optimized in real-time. AMP Clarity shows where productivity can be increased and the material capture improved, and actions to gain operational efficiency can be taken.
Benefits of AMP Clarity™:
– Real-time data: gain material characterization in real-time for taking swift action to improve material capture.
– Monitor & Report: monitor lines to gain insights, track material trends, and export data-rich reports.
– Audit: generate custom material composition reporting for precision analysis and line audits.
– Measure: measure facility performance, including robot sortation, and benchmark efficiency to take steps to optimize operation.
Description of the effect
AMP Robotics helps businesses, governments, and NGOs achieve higher recycling rates and supply greater volumes of post-consumer recycled content. What was once a contaminant or problematic material destined for landfill now has a path toward recovery and reuse made possible by the company’s advanced technology and systems.
AMP learns from the real world, not just the lab. Neuron recognizes more than 70 billion objects annually from field installations, and that number is compounding daily to create the highest levels of confidence in the data produced. The true success of AI is based on experience and repetition in real-world conditions. Training datasets are not enough. AMP’s intellectual property is vast – from the methods of data recognition to the experience of its artificial neural network – and the company’s applying innovation every day to create the best possible solution for the customer.
The AMP Cortex™ high-speed, intelligent robotics system is designed for faster and more precise recovery of plastics. The user can distinguish plastics by material composition, color, clarity, opacity, and form factor with the industry’s leading artificial intelligence platform, and sort them with Cortex’s delta-style robots to tailor high-quality bales for sale to end markets. Supported material types and form factors:
– Material Types: polyethylene terephthalate (PET or PETE), high-density polyethylene (HDPE); low-density polyethylene (LDPE), polypropylene (PP), polystyrene (PS).
– Form Factors: water bottles, milk jugs, lids, tubs, cups, cartons, clamshells, coffee pods , thin films.
The AMP Cortex™ high-speed, intelligent robotics system can pick at twice the rate of a human sorter for more rapid, consistent metals recovery. The precision of Cortex prevents contamination and accelerates high-purity sorting of metals. Cortex is an optimal solution for UBC recovery on fiber and last-chance lines without the need for additional infrastructure. Supported material types: aluminum, aerosol cans, pie tins, pet food containers, nonferrous food containers, foil.
The user can improve efficiency on his B-lines and prevent loss of residual material with the AMP Cortex™ intelligent robotics system. The experiential learning of the AI platform that powers robots allows for specializing in the identification of discrete materials found in C&D applications. Cortex’s delta-style robots pick and process lighter and smaller objects like wood, metal, drywall, and plastics that gantry-style robots with parallel grippers typically miss. Recover fines and other small objects with precision and consistency, and capture new opportunities for wood and other fractions for resale. Supported material types: fiber, copper pipes and tubing, gypsum, UBCs, concrete, masonry, tile, wood, plastics.
The precision of AMP Cortex™ is well matched to the recovery requirements of electronic scrap (e-scrap). Cortex can identify and sort – at upwards of 80 picks per minute – the smallest pieces of material to maximize the value recovered from material streams. Cortex accurately and consistently targets and processes a wide array of precious metals, components, plastics, and more. Supported material types: batteries, capacitors, aluminum, brass, copper, stainless steel, wire, wound motors, plastic, PCB.
The AMP Cortex™ high-speed, intelligent robotics system removes contamination on fiber lines to recover higher-grade OCC (corrugated cardboard), mixed paper, SOP (sorted office paper), newsprint, and more. The user can generate cleaner bales for higher end-market pricing with continuous improvements in sorting efficacy and reliability driven by the industry’s most expansive AI platform. Supported material types: newspaper, sorted office paper, magazines, corrugated cardboard, boxboard paperboard containers, carrier stock , cartons, cups.
Extract more value from compost and organic waste regardless of contamination level with AI and robotics technology. Turn food and yard waste into materials that positively impact the environment and economy with AMP Cortex™.
The power behind AMP technologies: 70+ billion items seen annually; 300+ AI systems deployed globally; 50+ identifiable categories.
Company/companies that developed/implemented/offer the innovation
AMP Robotics is reimagining and actively modernizing the world’s recycling infrastructure. The company is doing this by applying AI and robotics to economically recover commodities reclaimed as raw materials for the global supply chain. Headquartered and with manufacturing operations in Colorado, AMP Robotics builds and deploys technology that solves many of the central challenges of recycling and shifts the economics of the industry to make it more efficient, cost-effective, scalable, and sustainable. With hundreds of systems installed across three continents, the company is increasing the value that can be extracted from recyclable material through superior separation, purity enhancement, and identification of new end markets for recycling and reuse.
AMP Robotics Corporation
Website: https://www.amprobotics.com/
Global Headquarters: 1875 Taylor Avenue, Louisville, Colorado, 80027 United States;
Phone: +1 888-402-1686
Regional contacts available here: https://www.amprobotics.com/global-presence
Contact form available here: https://www.amprobotics.com/contact
Additional information
https://www.amprobotics.com/casestudies