Bulletin No. 2, 2023

T wo years ago, Professor Liu Yun-hui and Professor Fei Chen from the Hong Kong Centre for Logistics Robotics at CUHK visited a metal recycling plant in Yuen Long, a messy environment filled with smells of waste. “They were rather bad working conditions,” recalls Professor Liu, Director of the Centre. “The workers were picking up small aluminium pieces from piles of scrap metal by hand for recycling, which was tedious physical work. It was difficult for the plant to hire enough workers. A leading scholar from CUHK’s Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering (MAE), Professor Liu and his robotics team had been invited by the plant owner to see how robots could help make operations more efficient. “We went on to visit many other recycling factories in the New Territories. The more we saw, the more we believed there was great potential for getting robots to do the job,” he says. “At the same time, some companies in the recycling industry were interested in collaboration. So we started to develop the technology.” Building on technologies including grasping and sensing, which the Centre’s team had been researching for years, they invented an intelligent, high-speed solid-waste sorting system. Using eight such systems, the plant in Yuen Long, processing 150 tonnes of scrap metal a day, is able to save more than 70 per cent of its costs compared to deploying workers for the same task. It can recover its investments in the systems in 11 months. The technology has been licensed to SOTA Robotics, a start-up set up earlier this year by Professor Chen. The company is Hong Kong’s first provider of automated robotic waste sorting solutions. “We do a lot of investigations in the market to identify the demand for robotics in different industries,” Professor Liu says. “We often go out to talk to industrial leaders in Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area to understand their needs. Sometimes they come to us with special requests like the recycling plant. When we see a potential demand, we explore the technology for commercialisation.” Members of the Hong Kong Centre for Logistics Robotics 20 Chinese University Bulletin No. 2, 2023