Greyparrot
Assembly Line
How Waste Robotics, Greyparrot are enhancing sorting robots
Greyparrot and Waste Robotics partnered earlier this year to enhance Waste Robotics’ sortation capabilities. The company creates robots that sort a variety of wastes, including construction and demolition, recyclables, metals, and municipal solid waste, and the everyday items tossed out by the public.
The company uses FANUC robot arms paired with its proprietary AI and gripper technology. Now, it’s also using Greyparrot’s AI to ensure its robots are being used at the most important parts of the waste sortation process.
Waste Robotics creates what it calls physical AI that helps robots identify and pick up a variety of items. The added AI layer from Greyparrot uses cameras to track all the materials passing on conveyor belts and create real-time insights on a live dashboard.
With Waste Robotics, the Greyparrot Analyzer is at work characterizing material streams and identifying the most impactful opportunities for automated robotic sorting. The combined product called the Robot Validator, allows Waste Robotics’ customers to know that they will be getting the most out of their robots from day one.
Bollegraaf and Greyparrot Forge Strategic AI Partnership to Transform Global Waste Management Industry
Bollegraaf, the world’s largest builder of recycling plants, has entered into a strategic partnership with Greyparrot, a pioneer in AI waste analytics, to transform global waste management. As part of the agreement, Bollegraaf will transfer its AI vision business to Greyparrot and also make a cash investment, for a total value of $12.8M, in Greyparrot, obtaining a non-controlling stake in the company. It will also serve as a worldwide distributor and strategic partner for Greyparrot’s Analyzer, which currently provides 100% visibility into waste streams at recycling plants across 14 countries using AI camera systems.
The deal includes Greyparrot acquiring Bollegraaf’s vision-based computing intellectual property (IP) and esteemed AI development team. Greyparrot will also open its first office in mainland Europe in the Netherlands.
With this groundbreaking partnership, both companies aim to retrofit thousands of existing Materials Recovery Facilities (MRFs) and Plastics Recovery Facilities (PRFs) with advanced AI capabilities to significantly boost recycling rates and quantify material emissions. The collaboration will bring forth revolutionary smart recycling plants that are fully automated and agile, unlocking new value in waste streams while diverting millions of tonnes of waste away from landfills, oceans, and incinerators. In a development set to transform waste management, this marks a momentous acceleration in the global shift from a linear to a circular economy. Together, Greyparrot and Bollegraaf commit to developing further products that combine the strengths of both companies to make the vision of fully automated and intelligent sorting facilities a reality.
How recovery facilities improve performance with AI residue line analysis
Residue lines hold a lot of potential for recovery facilities. That’s because they often contain more of your raw materials than you’d like, which could have been turned into revenue. Assessing the residue stream is like a blood test for your plant, if there’s a lot of valuable material on the conveyor belt, your operations need a check-up.
The more material a facility recovers, the less it sends to landfills. If this plant recovered more valuable material, they wouldn’t just make money on their products — based on UK fees, they’d save £56,000 a month by cutting unnecessary gate fees.