TWO inventors who laboured in a Poole garage to invent a robotic system for sorting rubbish have turned it into a business nominated for an international award.

Victor Dewulf and Peter Hedley developed the prototype for their artificial intelligence-driven waste management system in the garage of Mr Hedley’s parents.

They started out with a treadmill, a camera and a pile of waste collected from bins in Poole and went on to raise millions of euros in funding.

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Their invention has been shortlisted for the inaugural Young Inventors Prize from the European Patent Office. The two-part invention consists of a computer vision system which uses artificial intelligence to identify different types of waste, plus with a robotic arm that moves on six axes to autonomously pick out valuable material from a recycling conveyor with mixed, low-value waste.

Recycling sites can use the vision system and the robot arm alone or together. The invention aims to increase the purity, and therefore the value, of recycled waste bales.

European Patent Office president Antonio Campinos said: “With their twin waste recognition and sorting solutions, Victor Dewulf and Peter Hedley are making a vital contribution to reducing the world’s waste and moving towards a circular economy.

“The speed at which they have not just developed these innovations, but also turned them into reality, is remarkable and we look forward to seeing their story unfold.”

Poole-raised Mr Hedley and Belgian Mr Dewulf met as undergraduates at the University of Bath.

Mr Dewulf visited a recycling facility as part of his master’s course on environmental engineering and saw how labour-intensive the process was. He wrote a thesis on waste-sorting automation using computer vision and in 2019, he enlisted Mr Hedley to develop a waste recognition system powered by computer vision.

They founded their business Recycleye in 2019 and raised £800,000 in seed investment. By the end of that year, their Recycleye Vision system was used locally by the UK waste management firms Biffa and Re-Gen as well as in France.

In March this year, Recycleye was awarded funding from UK Research and Innovation’s Smart Sustainable Plastic packaging Challenge to lead an R&D project.

Mr Hedley said: “Our visual recognition system can run on the fastest belts within a waste plant, which our competitors can't do.

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“The AI prioritisation of waste picking helps us get to about a 300 per cent performance increase — and a 300 per cent increase in the bottom line for our facilities really helps them and their margins.”

They are jointly named as one of three finalists for the prize, which recognises inventors up to 30 who have developed solutions to tackle global problems and help reach the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

The winners will be announced at a virtual ceremony on June 21.