AETECH ATRON AI Waste Sorting Robot

Aetech is a South Korean resource circulation technology company headquartered in the Green Cluster in Seo-gu, Incheon, with a Seoul branch and a robot recycling centre. It addresses the labour shortage, ageing workforce, safety risks and limited accuracy of manual sorting lines at recycling facilities, which cap how much collected waste is actually recycled.

ATRON combines vision optics, the wai-kor deep learning engine trained on more than 5.5 million Korean waste records and a three-axis robot arm with a vacuum gripper that switches between suction and release in about 0.3 seconds. It sorts nine waste types, including PET, PP, PE, PS, glass, cans, paper and film, into more than 52 subcategories by material and colour, with 99.3% recognition accuracy and up to 96 picks per minute. A monitoring system logs volumes by material, robot status, maintenance and power use. Aetech also designs airo-mrf, a robot-based material recovery facility producing r-PET flakes. Customers are municipal and private recycling centres.

• Vision AI: wai-kor deep learning engine trained on more than 5.5 million waste records identifies material and colour.
• Robot picking: three-axis arm with vacuum gripper switching in about 0.3 seconds, up to 96 picks per minute.
• Fine classification: nine waste types and more than 52 subcategories, including PET by colour and glass by colour.
• Site customisation: optics, frames, end effectors and air devices adapted to each facility.
• Operations monitoring: logs inbound volume, sorted quantities, robot status, consumables and power use.
• airo-mrf: robot-based material recovery facility design that outputs r-PET flakes.

Urban environment companies in Vietnamese cities can add ATRON robots to sorting lines for source-separated recyclables. PET recyclers can sort bottles by colour before washing and flaking to reach bottle-grade quality. Industrial parks and island destinations such as Phu Quoc can automate sorting at small material recovery facilities with limited labour.

Recycling centres can run sorting for long shifts without fatigue and reduce dependence on scarce manual labour. ATRON picks up to 96 items per minute, about 2.4 times the roughly 40 items per minute measured for manual sorting by the company. Colour and material sorting produces cleaner PET, glass and can fractions that sell at higher value. Real-time monitoring of throughput, robot status and power use supports operations, with online remote service for faults.

Recycling facilities across Asia face rising labour costs and stricter quality demands for recycled PET used in bottles. In Vietnam, source separation of household waste is now required and EPR obligations push producers to fund recycling, which is expected to increase the volume of sorted recyclables that need efficient, automated secondary sorting.

Aetech Co., Ltd is headquartered in Incheon, South Korea, with a Seoul branch. As of August 2026 it reports 31 ATRON units at 13 sites, including public facilities in Seoul Songpa-gu, Seongnam, Incheon Yeonsu-gu and Jeju. Awards include the CES 2026 Innovation Award, FIX 2025 Global Media Awards (Ubergizmo Top 3) and the K-Global Innovation Award (2025).