Robotic throwing controller for accelerating a recycling line

Recycling is a promising way to prevent the use of
raw material and reduce energy consumption, air pollution and
waste. However, the process of recycling has to be economically
efficient in order to be adopted by industrial manufacturers.
One way to achieve this goal is to improve the recycling rate.
We propose a novel method to design a machine learningbased controller to improve the efficiency of a recycling line by
throwing waste into buckets instead of picking and dropping
them. Our proof-of-concept is demonstrated on stones, because
of their simple and uniform shapes. The method enables an
ABB IRB 340 robot to throw objects to buckets with an
empirical success rate of 99%.