Russia has created a smart optical garbage sorter

Specialists of the NTI Competence Center "Wireless Communication Technologies and Internet of Things" at Skoltech have developed a smart device that can annually extract millions of tons of useful resources, such as plastic, glass, paper, from the household waste of Russians. This was reported to Izvestia in the press service of the National Technological Initiative Project Support Fund. The apparatus should replace the flagship imported separators, which are difficult to import into Russia.

"Even separately collected waste is subject to additional sorting - it must be sorted by class and color," Anton Stepanov, a research engineer at the Competence Center, said in the press release.

At the same time, it is almost unrealistic to put the right number of people on sorting. The developers emphasized that a huge share of secondary raw materials is lost because of this. To solve these problems, they have created a prototype of a smart sorting machine, which alone can replace 30 specialists.

The optical sorter extracts an average of 10 objects per second. It includes an accelerating conveyor with a belt width of 2 meters, on which the waste moves at a speed of 3 m/s, a system of illumination in the area of camera installation, as well as two cameras - optical and hyperspectral, which are responsible for scanning the garbage.

The optical camera detects the shape and color, while the hyperspectral infrared camera helps to recognize the material of objects, as objects made of different materials can look the same. The recognition accuracy is 90%. The separator now works with 12 classes of waste: cardboard, glass, films and different types of plastic.

Read more in Izvestia's exclusive article:

Calculate all waste: a smart optical garbage sorter has been created in the Russian Federation