Real-time sorting system for the Construction and Demolition Waste materials

Abstract

Construction and Demolition Waste (CDW) represents more than a third of all the generated waste in Europe. Taken into consideration the amount of waste coming from CDW, together with the inadequate management leads to critical tasks for economy, society and environment. Due to the fact that constructions are in continuous building, it is fundamental to investigate the CDW status and to develop new innovative ideas to tackle this issue. The aim of this research is to introduce a new idea and architecture of an intelligent sorting system describing a robotic arm and a classification algorithm based on the information coming from hyperspectral cameras and reflectance sensors, that in the future will be capable to achieve a complete separation of the coarse fractions of CDW materials and obtain sorted classes of aggregates bricks, ceramics, glass, plastics, and wood.