Lakeshore Recycling Systems Installs Commercial Robot

SEATTLE (Waste 360): Lakeshore Recycling Systems’ Heartland materials recovery facility (MRF) in Chicago has installed the first commercial SamurAI, a robot that recognizes and sorts multiple materials.

The robot works exclusively with rigid containers, including PET, colored and natural HDPE and cartons, for now.

Lakeshore explains it wanted to speed up these high-volume lines while finding a way to cut costs to compensate for problems with another commodity.

“We were looking at SamurAI a year ago when the paper markets fell apart, especially mixed papers,” says Alan Handley, CEO Lakeshore Recycling Systems. “We had to reduce costs to keep our operations’ cash flow neutral or mitigate as much loss as we could. All we could do was remove labor from the sorting line(s). We started looking at automation.”

Lakeshore’s first SamurAI is up and running, and Handley has ordered two more. Each will replace two full-time sorters, which will translate to about $120,000 to $130,000 a year in savings per robot.

SamurAI sits on the line, “watching” and pulling materials, and computing and storing data on them. The fully contained machine has four support arms as well as one production arm with suction cups to pick up material, which it drops in the proper bin.

AMP Robotics, in Boulder, Colo., developed the recognition technology incorporated in the bot.

Machinex and AMP announced their newly formed partnership to advance SamurAI at WasteExpo in Las Vegas this past April, and the first robot went in at Lakeshore Recycling a month later.

Courtesy: https://waste360.com