Software as a service platform Jodone's latest design makes sorting recyclables from trash faster, more efficient and ultimately, more profitable. Made for use with industry standard robots from multiple suppliers, the interface turns the acts of recognizing and categorizing recyclables into a game. As waste travels along a conveyer belt, workers swipe a touch screen to classify items as recyclable. The instructions are sent wirelessly to robotic arms that then pick and sort the appropriate pieces. In the laboratory, the collaborative process achieved a recycling rate eight times higher than humans alone and with a 95 percent accuracy rate.

Trash can be sticky, stinky, and sharp. The entrepreneurs at Jodone want to turn this mundane task into a human-robot collaborative game to improve efficiency and accuracy. For Jodone's new pilot project at the Pope/Douglas waste-to-energy facility in Alexandria, Minnesota, human operators will use its software to monitor waste as it travels along a conveyor belt. Using a touch screen, workers will swipe any recyclables they spot and then select the appropriate category: paper, plastic, tin, etc. Those instructions will be sent wirelessly to robotic arms that will grab the recyclables and drop them in the correct bin.

The system leverages a high-def video of the incoming trash line, touchscreen software and robotic arms to eliminate the need for humans to touch trash directly. A human worker watches the video feed to identify various items -- newspapers, glass bottles, tin cans, old batteries, that sort of thing. Once the human spots a recyclable, he swipes the item into a segregated onscreen bin. Then, and this is really cool, a robotic arm down on the trash line interprets that action, reaches into the mess to grab the item and toss it into a separate pile. According to Jodone's lab tests, this system can enables users to pick up to eight times the amount of trash -- roughly 2,500 pieces an hour -- than they could alone, with 95 percent accuracy. "We know that robots are great at manual labor--at doing the same thing a million times in a row.