Integrated recycle plant for electric home appliances-automated recognition and sorting of product types

The social demands of recycling are becoming strong. In modern production systems, a large number of one model of product is manufactured at a time and the production operations are well specified. In recycling systems, on the contrary, it is usual that disassembly operations differ for each work unit. Because of this, achieving high efficiency in recycling systems has been difficult. In a AEHA (Assoc. Electric Home Appliances) project of building an technical evaluation plant for the recycling of home electric appliances, the authors developed an automated system of recognizing and sorting used appliances. In order to solve the basic problem of handling various objects, they introduced a recognition and sorting system by applying an artificial vision and intelligent database system. In this report, they discuss its architecture, specifications and some details of the information technology implemented in the system