UMass Graduates Develop AI Program to Sort Recycling

UMass will be launching a pilot program that utilizes AI-driven robots to help sort recycling on the campus.

Two UMass Amherst engineering graduates, Ethan Walko, and Ian Goodie, founded the robotics company rStream. The duo’s innovation sees AI identify, in real-time, what is being thrown away in a single bin and then sorting it for proper disposal.

“The big problem in recycling is people just don’t put stuff in the right bin. The world rStream wants to make is one where consumers put everything in a single bin, and automation does the rest,” Goodine says.

The National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research provided a grant of $275,000 to the program along with $125,000 from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center’s AmplifyMass program.

“Making robotics to sort waste is the end goal,” says Goodine. “But developing a robot for this task is an exceptional R&D effort. rStream is deploying this auditing system to accelerate our research into real-world settings and prove that we’ve developed a state-of-the-art AI ‘brain’ for our robot.”

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