Project Grant 1448221

The National Science Foundation awarded Optisort LLC a $255,644 Project Grant under the Engineering federal grant program (CFDA 47.041) to develop a robotic vertical glass sorter powered by machine vision and artificial intelligence for glass recycling. The sorter will utilize computer vision and AI technologies to accurately identify and separate glass materials during the recycling process, enabling more accessible, sustainable, and cost-effective glass recycling. The one-year grant period...

Rstream Recycling LLC received a $275,000 Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation under the NSF Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships program (CFDA 47.084) to develop an autonomous waste sorting platform. The platform aims to improve landfill diversion and recycling rates for non-industrial waste streams at high-traffic venues like stadiums, universities, airports, and theme parks. Currently, waste sorting at these facilities is done manually or through expensive robotic...

This Cooperative Agreement award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) under the Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships (CFDA 47.084) program provides $995,163 to Rstream Recycling Inc. to develop an intelligent waste-sorting system for high-traffic venues (HTVs) such as stadiums, universities, airports, and theme parks. The project aims to build a compact, high-throughput, and high-accuracy sorting system that leverages computer vision and machine learning to enable on-site,...

This Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's Engineering program (CFDA 47.041) provides $119,466 to the University of Georgia Research Foundation, Inc. to conduct research on a novel robotic system for high-precision disassembly of discarded electronic devices like cell phones, tablets, and laptops. The research aims to develop the fundamental understanding and enabling technologies needed for a robotic system that can accurately see, interpret, and disassemble...

This $6,541,163 Project Grant awarded by the U.S. Department of Energy's Conservation Research and Development program (CFDA 81.086) to Amp Robotics Corporation aims to demonstrate the techno-economic viability of automated characterization and sorting of batteries within electronic waste. The project objective is to achieve a greater than 25% improvement in total dollars per ton for preprocessing batteries by chemistry through the creation of a sorting prototype using artificial intelligence...

This National Science Foundation Division of Industrial Innovation Project Grant awarded $256,000 to Grain Weevil Corporation of Aurora, Nebraska to develop a remote-controlled grain management and extraction robot. The 11-month project, which runs from March 2022 through December 2022, seeks to demonstrate the technical feasibility of a mobile robot for improving farmer safety and grain storage efficiencies. Key deliverables include classifying grain surface variables that impact robotic...

This $548,168 Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships (CFDA 47.084) program aims to develop and translate robotic manipulator technology for enhanced supply chain efficiency and dexterous material handling. The principal investigator's team at Columbia University will build on their previous work in deep reinforcement learning for complex robotic manipulation tasks, focusing on extrinsic manipulation strategies that can enable...

This $350,000 Project Grant awarded by the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) program to Oregon State University aims to develop an integrated circuit hardware system and data collection/decision support metrics to establish a quantitative information ecosystem for electronic device reuse and recycling. The key activities under this 3-year project include: 1) Developing low-cost wireless tags to provide recyclers with easy-to-read...

Dextrous Robotics, Inc. received a $256,000 Small Business Innovation Research Phase I Project Grant from the National Science Foundation under the Engineering program (CFDA 47.041) to develop automated perception capabilities for robotic chopsticks manipulating small and large objects in constrained spaces. The six-month project running from July to December 2021 aims to advance robotic grasping technologies through research on computer vision and tactile sensing that enables dexterous...

The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a $275,000 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project grant to Crabline Robotics LLC, a woman-owned small business, to develop a dexterous, crab-like aquatic robot platform for underwater construction and decommissioning of structures. The project seeks to create a new class of aquatic robotics capable of stabilizing around a target and precisely delivering tools, such as exothermic cutting rods, to underwater structures. This...