After graduating from university in Canada and living abroad for a long time, I learned that the standards for waste separation in Korea are very strict. I don't want the inconvenience of waste separation in the city where I will live in the future, so I decided to start a business. In this era when people are thinking a lot about the environment and their awareness is changing, I hope for a world where waste separation can be entrusted to robots and we don't have to suffer any inconvenience anymore.” (Park Taehyung, CEO of AETECH)
Will there be a world where the tedious waste separation is completely eliminated? At the '2024 1st InnoBiz PR Day' held at the AETECH headquarters in Guro-gu, Seoul on the 25th, Park Taehyung, CEO of AETECH, expressed his ambition for a world without waste separation worries, where the AI-based waste sorting robot 'ATRON' will create.
AETECH, established in 2020, developed the AI-based resource sorting robot ATRON to automate the conventional manual waste sorting process. ATRON, based on AI technology, can improve recognition accuracy by learning from more than 2.6 million actual waste data and can recognize and classify a total of 45 types of waste.
The effects of using ATRON are tremendous from the company's perspective. The waste sorting speed has increased by 240% compared to the past, and the waste sorting cost has been reduced by 266%. Moreover, ATRON can reduce the carbon footprint by 860kg per unit, bringing us a step closer to achieving true environmental friendliness.
AI algorithms are used for waste sorting. It can automatically classify waste based on its components, colors, and uses. For example, it can classify whether a shampoo bottle is made of vinyl (PE) or PET through spectral analysis. The accuracy is almost 100%.
AETECH has delivered more than 10 ATRONs to Incheon Namdong-gu, Gyeonggi Namyangju-si/Sungnam-si, and Gyeongbuk Cheongdo-gun. This year, it plans to install a 'Dual ATRON' at Seoul's food waste treatment center and resource circulation center, which consists of two robot arms installed front and back to pick up missed objects from the front again at the rear, and conduct a testbed demonstration project in Seoul.
CEO Park emphasized, “ATRON will not only replace existing labor but also maximize the operational efficiency of waste sorting facilities that require environmental improvement and contribute to resolving labor shortages” and stressed that “AETECH will grow not just as a simple robot supplier but as a plant operation company, providing consultancy for domestic recycling sorting facility commissioning and design.”
Meanwhile, AETECH is also pursuing the establishment of a 'Robot Resource Recovery Center' where operations are fully automated based on ATRON. The Robot Resource Recovery Center is the first AI factory to provide a sorting solution using more than 20 ATRONs and a circular conveyor belt. While the recycling rate of conventional sorting facilities was only 30%, the goal of the unmanned Robot Resource Recovery Center is to increase the recycling rate to 80%.
By Reporter Lee Ho-joon