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Innovate UK awards £500,000 to Greyparrot, Middlesex University and Paper Round to fund trials for AI robotics to sort plastics
Recycling & Waste Management Innovate UK awards £500,000 to Greyparrot, Middlesex University and Paper Round to fund trials for AI robotics to sort plastics
Novel AI robotics will be installed at Paper Round’s Materials Recovery Facility to trial automation technology to improve the efficiency of plastics sorting.
In a joint bid, London-based recycling company Paper Round with leading AI startup Greyparrot and Middlesex University have been awarded £500,000 by Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency to develop an AI driven lowcost robotic solution to detect and recover plastics from mixed waste streams. The technology will be retrofitted at Paper Round’s existing Materials Recovery Facility in Purfleet, Essex in summer 2021 for trials after lab tests.
The £500,000 grant will accelerate research on the integration of AI visual capability into third-party robotics. Working with Greyparrot and Middlesex University, Paper Round will give feedback on captured images of plastics, as well as provide the waste data to train the AI vision system. They will also provide a testing site, to optimise the robotics and allow for greater accuracy of sorting.
The AI waste recognition software created by Greyparrot will be integrated into a thirdparty hardware system and will use deep learning technologies to solve complex visual problems to ensure robots can ‘see’ the waste with the same or better accuracy than humans. The software uses embedded prediction models that allow remote continuous monitoring and improvement.
Just under 60% of plastic bottles and 33% of pots, tubs and trays are recycled in the UK and current automated processing solutions are unable to fully sort the wideranging variety of plastic types effectively at low cost. Rapidly developing AI identification technology coupled with low-cost robotics offers the opportunity to help boost the recycling figure.
The project will serve innovators in the industry who seek intelligent software to power waste sorting machines.
Bill Swan, Managing Director of Paper Round said: ‘We are excited to be part of these trials. We see many different types of plastics on our sorting facility, and we welcome the opportunity to be able to more efficiently identify and sort these for recycling.’
Mikela Druckman, Co-founder & CEO of Greyparrot: “We are thrilled to be working with Paper Round on this innovative project. This grant also opens up collaborative opportunities to embed our waste recognition software with machinery providers to ensure products at the end of life are captured for recycling efficiently.”
Mehmet Karamanoglu, Middlesex University: “We welcome this fantastic opportunity to collaborate with our partners in tackling such an important issue. Being able to use our robotics and AI research expertise that will lead to tangible and practical outcomes is great to see. We are looking forward to helping make a significant contribution in tackling the challenges with rapid plastics identification and recycling.”
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