Plastics Recycling Robot 

 These days, pollution from discarded plastic is getting serious. Great Pacific garbage patch consisted of abandoned plastics is killing marine life. Micro-plastics induced by waves and solar UV radiation can be accumulated in the human body. Recycling plastic is the hot potato of waste management. 

 To solve this problem brilliantly, factory automation in recycling plants is essential to handle more waste faster. The amount of reproduced raw plastics is proportional to the inlet speed of the plastics waste stream into a recycling process line. And the quality of recycled products with reproduced raw plastics depends on the sorting purity through the line. Thus, an automated system should be capable of real-time classifying plastics category and rapid manipulating for removing selected things. 

 We propose a real-time sorting system for mixed color plastics by applying a machine learning algorithm and parallel manipulator with a vacuum suction pad. The learning data and picking test samples were collected from a municipal waste from corporation’s factory. This work shows feasibility real-time plastics recycling automation and future development direction.