Robotic Triage for Value Retention in a Circular Economy (RoboTriage)

In the current Circular Economy (CE) landscape, many activities fail to fully realise the potential value of products, components, and materials. Rather than being repaired, reused, or remanufactured, a significant number of products end up in mixed waste streams and are recycled, which is the least valuable end-of-life CE option. This leads to a substantial loss of residual value.

One of the critical challenges in the CE is the absence of effective and efficient methods for large-scale separation of products, which are in very different used or end-of-life conditions, into various CE options such as reuse, repair, remanufacture, repurpose, or recycle. The presence of mixed waste streams poses a significant barrier to creating tighter loops of circularity and preserving materials at their highest value for an extended period. The current methods of evaluating end-of-life options are inefficient and inaccurate as they heavily rely on human judgment, which is often based on experience and prone to bias and error.

Similar to how triage can help create priorities and organisations in healthcare systems, RoboTriage proposes a new concept, circularity triage, referring to the process of rapidly examining products, components and parts to determine their best CE option, e.g. reuse, repair, remanufacture, repurpose, or recycle.

We aim to create and develop robotic systems that can perform circularity triage by capturing the health condition data of used products, allowing for a swift evaluation of product conditions so as to group products of similar conditions, avoid mixed waste streams and recommend the highest-value CE options.

RoboTriage has five objectives:

O1: To create robotic systems that can perform triage operations (at the operation level).
O2: To create system intelligence that enables smart planning of triage operations (task level).
O3: To identify new patterns and connections between product history data and product conditions using autonomous large-scale robotic triage (task level).
O4: To identify value opportunities and develop circular business models with the new patterns and connections obtained to facilitate high-value retention (system level).
O5: To support the uptake of CE and sustainability considerations and practices by industrial partners through three flagship case studies.
RoboTriage's academic impact transcends the manufacturing and CE domains, extending to ICT, AI, and data science. The influence of RoboTriage extends into economic, societal, and environmental domains. RoboTriage technologies have the potential to be deployed for CE purposes, thereby enhancing their scale and productivity. On average, a one per cent increase in robot density correlates with a 0.8 per cent increase in productivity.

The impact of ideas in RoboTriage will be exemplified by our 11 industrial partners and over £700k contributions (including over £400k cash contributions) from the three host institutions and external partners.

Facilitated by RoboTriage technologies, the promotion of high-value CE options such as remanufacturing could lead to a 90% reduction in primary material usage and a 55% reduction in energy and emission impact. The impact of this project will extend to international organisations through our United Nations partners, ITU and UNESCO, both of which are also our project partners.