Robot Sorting
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.
How Ambi Robotics rolls out improvements for peak season
Founded in 2018, Ambi Robotics is developing robots that scale e-commerce operations to meet demand. Its latest system, the AmbiSort B-Series, is a modular parcel induction and sorting system using artificial intelligence.
The sort-to-gaylord system can handle up to 1,200 sorts per hour. In addition, it can be used in various use cases, such as reverse logistics, zone skipping, and AI-vision quality control, making it one of the more configurable systems available in the market, said Ambi. Last year, the company won an RBR50 Robotics Innovation Award for the system.
The company said these changes increased throughput to 500 sorts per hour and brought its sort accuracy to 99.6%. For context, Ambi Robotics was performing 410 sorts per hour during peak season in 2023, and 355 sorts per hour in 2022.
To determine which areas have the most room for improvement, Ambi combs through key performance indicators (KPIs) for each of its robots. The KPIs include uptime, sorting accuracy, and more. “We try to tie everything we do back to the customer impact and think about what is our biggest opportunity to affect operations now or in the near future,” said Mahler. “We typically are defining that with metrics.”