Danu Robotics’ fight to build a better recycling robot
For Danu Robotics founder Amy Ma, the eureka moment came after years of working as a software developer at a London bank. It was the kind of high-touch office that’s typical in finance — but despite all the perks, Ma was alarmed to realize that the building’s recycling bins were being emptied into the trash.
对于 Danu Robotics 的创始人 Amy Ma 来说，灵感迸发的时刻源于她在伦敦一家银行担任软件开发人员的多年工作经历。那是一种典型的金融行业高规格办公室，但尽管福利优厚，Ma 却震惊地发现，大楼里的回收箱最终都被倒进了垃圾堆。
“Even though they have tons of money, there’s all these different recycling bins that just end up in the same place,” Ma told TechCrunch. The more she dug into the problem, the deeper it seemed to go. It wasn’t just her building. The economics of recycling as a whole often boil down to human beings sorting by hand through streams of waste to pull out different kinds of recyclable material.
“尽管他们财力雄厚，但所有这些不同的回收箱最终还是被送到了同一个地方，”Ma 在接受 TechCrunch 采访时说道。她对这个问题挖掘得越深，就越发现问题的严重性。这不仅仅发生在她所在的办公楼。整个回收行业的经济效益往往归结为人工分拣废弃物，以挑出不同种类的可回收材料。
“I saw the technology and thought, we can do so much better,” Ma remembers. Now, she’s making good on that promise with six-year-old, Edinburgh, Scotland-based Danu Robotics, which makes a robot designed to sort through recycling more cheaply and quickly. Ma has been working on that idea for six years and is finally bringing her version of the product to market.
“我看到了相关技术，心想我们可以做得更好，”Ma 回忆道。如今，她正通过总部位于苏格兰爱丁堡、成立六年的 Danu Robotics 来兑现这一承诺。该公司制造的机器人旨在以更低廉、更快捷的方式进行回收分拣。Ma 为此构思了六年，终于将她的产品推向了市场。
Her robot, dubbed H.E.R.O., has a few advantages over its competitors. For example, it picks up items with a pincer claw instead of a suction system. But the bigger difference is the business approach: Danu leverages AI to continuously improve the robot’s software. The approach is already seeing some traction.
她的机器人被命名为 H.E.R.O.，与竞争对手相比具有一些优势。例如，它使用钳爪而不是吸附系统来抓取物品。但更大的区别在于商业模式：Danu 利用人工智能不断改进机器人的软件。这种方法已经初见成效。
Danu has letters of interest from two large customers and $500,000 worth of signed contracts. More notably, more than 200 customers are in its sales pipeline, which gives the company a hook into the $20 billion market for recycling sorting across Europe and North America. On the back of that promise, Dabnu has raised $5 million in late-seed funding to keep the commercial pressure on.
Danu 已收到两家大客户的意向书，并签署了价值 50 万美元的合同。更值得注意的是，其销售渠道中还有 200 多家潜在客户，这使该公司得以切入欧洲和北美价值 200 亿美元的回收分拣市场。基于这一前景，Danu 已筹集了 500 万美元的种子轮后期资金，以保持商业竞争力。
There’s already a robust market for robotic waste-pickers, particularly the suction-based arms offered by competitors like Glacier and RecycleEye. But Ma believes the economics of recycling will make it easy for a new competitor to prove its worth. Because recycling centers make money off the materials they’re able to sort out, there’s an immediate return on investment for a working system.
机器人垃圾分拣市场已经非常成熟，尤其是 Glacier 和 RecycleEye 等竞争对手提供的吸附式机械臂。但 Ma 认为，回收行业的经济逻辑将使新竞争者很容易证明其价值。由于回收中心通过分拣出的材料获利，一套高效运行的系统能带来直接的投资回报。
Ma estimates that a working site will earn $485,000 in additional revenue from having the robot on the sorting line, compared with a $160,000 initial investment and $24,000 in maintenance fees each year. That’s significantly cheaper than the competition, and Ma believes the robot will be more efficient, too.
Ma 估计，在分拣线上部署该机器人，一个工作站点将获得 48.5 万美元的额外收入，而初始投资为 16 万美元，每年的维护费用为 2.4 万美元。这比竞争对手的产品便宜得多，而且 Ma 相信该机器人也会更高效。
Since those machines are already shipping, Ma’s next goal is to make the robot sturdier, smaller, and more versatile. Once it’s portable enough, it can be used outside dedicated waste facilities, opening up a whole other world of use cases.
由于这些机器已经开始出货，Ma 的下一个目标是让机器人更坚固、更小巧、功能更全面。一旦其便携性达到要求，它就可以在专门的废弃物处理设施之外使用，从而开辟出全新的应用场景。
“Once it’s smaller, it can be used as a stand-alone recycling solution for events, for shopping centers, hospitals, or airports to recycle their waste at the source,” Ma told TechCrunch, “and that’s the way we can really change how we’re managing our packaging waste.”
“一旦体积缩小，它就可以作为一种独立的回收解决方案，用于活动现场、购物中心、医院或机场，在源头处理废弃物，”Ma 告诉 TechCrunch，“这才是我们真正改变包装废弃物管理方式的途径。”