AMP Robotics’ first AI-guided robotics system installed in the UK, at Recyco, Northern Ireland
AMP Robotics Corp. has installed its first AI-guided robotics systems in the UK and Ireland with Recyco, a leading recycling and waste management business in Northern Ireland.
The project includes two robots—a single AMP Cortex unit along with a tandem unit—installed on Recyco's fibre lines for quality control to improve pick rates and bale purity. Recyco is the first deal closed with REP-TEC Advanced Technologies, AMP's recently appointed official reseller and integrator for customers in the UK and Ireland, with several other projects in negotiation.
"We're delighted to bring our first robots to the UK and Ireland as we continue to see strong demand for our AI and automation solutions and build our pipeline in Europe," said Gary Ashburner, European general manager for AMP. "Recyco has been a superb partner in this process, and recognizes our technology addresses chronic staffing challenges it and many recyclers face, while aligning with its goals of maximizing recovery, increasing landfill diversion, and advancing sustainability."
AMP's proprietary technology applies computer vision and deep learning to guide high-speed robotics systems to precisely identify, differentiate, and recover recyclables found in the waste stream by color, size, shape, opacity, and more, storing data about each item it perceives. AMP's sorting technology can pick upwards of 80 items per minute, about twice the pace of a human sorter, and the company has recorded up to 150 picks per minute with its tandem units. The company's AI platform can quickly adapt to packaging introduced into the recycling stream with recognition capabilities to the brand level—increasingly critical as demand for sufficient quantities of high-quality recycled material grows to meet consumer packaged goods companies' commitment to use of post-consumer recycled content.
"AMP's robots have quickly doubled the pick rates we were accustomed to, maintaining and even improving the purity of our bales, which we depend on to maximize prices with our end-market buyers," said Michael Cunningham, owner and CEO, Recyco. "We're proud to be leading the way for AI-powered recycling in these islands, and look forward to continued gains in productivity and efficiency."
"It's great to have our first robotics installation go live this month, with the project running very smoothly from start to finish," said Colm Grimes, founder and CEO of REP-TEC. "We started the installation on a Friday evening, and by Sunday evening, we had both Cortex systems ready for the shift starting the next morning. We were blown away with the identification accuracy of the AI given this is AMP's first installation in the UK."
AMP now has more than 160 systems installed globally, covering North America, Asia, and Europe. The company's AI platform, AMP Neuron™, encompasses the largest known real-world dataset of recyclable materials for machine learning, with the ability to classify more than 100 different categories and characteristics of recyclables across single-stream recycling; e-scrap; and construction and demolition debris, and reaching an object recognition run rate of more than 10 billion items annually.
