ALPHA

TeknTrash

United Kingdom

Product Page

ALPHA — Automated Large Processing Humanoid Assistant — is TeknTrash's humanoid robot for work that is unsafe, unsanitary and degrading, starting with recycling plants. Physically it is a chest with two 6-DoF gripper arms, a 2-DoF head with a binocular depth camera, a lifting column and a wheeled autonomous base; the column travels a metre so the arms can work at up to 2000 mm, and the robot runs for up to seven hours and charges in three. It is designed to sort at least as well as a human — 42 picks per minute, against the 30 to 40 that human sorters manage before fatigue sets in — and it needs no facility redesign: you put it where a human would stand and connect it to the internet. Five things set it apart from fixed robotic-arm sorters: hyperspectral cameras see beyond the visible spectrum into UV, X-ray and infrared; cameras at the head of the conveyor belt track waste and assign it to robots further down the line; it uses grippers rather than suction cups that need constant cleaning; it can move to catch waste it missed; and it is a true humanoid, intended ultimately to replace humans across every task in a plant. Computing is an NVIDIA Orin AGX delivering 275 TOPS. Unusually, ALPHA is meant to work in teams of at least two, permanently connected to a cloud that watches a central camera and tells each unit what to do, rather than each robot acting alone. It is sold as Robot-as-a-Service: GBP 50,000 to implement, twelve months with no operational fees, then a monthly fee equal to the wage of the worker it supports or replaces.