When robots recycle with Matanya Horowitz of AMP Robotics

Hello and welcome to how I built this lab. I'm Guy Raz. Right before the pandemic, I joined my son on a school field trip to a recycling center in the Bay Area here in California, and I was really surprised to see how it works. There was a giant conveyor belt of glass and plastic and paper all mixed up. And a row of people sorting it as fast as they could.

And while the workers were amazing and fast, There was a ton of stuff that was inevitably left behind. and not recycled. In the US, the EPA estimates that only a third of all waste actually gets recycled.

And one of the main reasons for this Well, most recycling facilities just aren't equipped to sort through all the materials they receive. My guest today, Matania Horowitz, launched Amp Robotics in 2014 to tackle this very problem. The company uses artificial intelligence and robots to sort through waste more efficiently, which means recycling facilities across the world are able to actually recycle more of the material they receive. Batania studied robotics at Caltech and it was there where he discovered deep learning. It's a method in artificial intelligence that enables computers to process data

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