Versatile waste sorting in small batch and flexible manufacturing industries using deep learning techniques.

The expansion of LEAN and small batch manufacturing demands flexible automated workstations capable of switching between sorting various wastes over time. To address this challenge, our study is focused on assessing the ability of the Segment Anything Model (SAM) family of deep learning architectures to separate highly variable objects during robotic waste sorting. The proposed two-step procedure for generic versatile visual waste sorting is based on the SAM architectures (original SAM, FastSAM, MobileSAMv2, and EfficientSAM) for waste object extraction from raw images, and the use of classification architecture (MobileNetV2, VGG19, Dense-Net, Squeeze-Net, ResNet, and Inception-v3) for accurate waste sorting. Such a pipeline brings two key advantages that make it more applicable in industry practice by: 1) eliminating the necessity for developing dedicated waste detection and segmentation algorithms for waste object localization, and 2) significantly reducing the time and costs required for adapting the solution to different use cases. With the proposed procedure, switching to a new waste type sorting is reduced to only two steps: The use of SAM for the automatic object extraction, followed by their separation into corresponding classes used to fine-tune the classifier. Validation on four use cases (floating waste, municipal waste, e-waste, and smart bins) shows robust results, with accuracy ranging from 86 to 97% when using the MobileNetV2 with SAM and FastSAM architectures. The proposed approach has a high potential to facilitate deployment, increase productivity, lower expenses, and minimize errors in robotic waste sorting while enhancing overall recycling and material utilization in the manufacturing industry.
Competing Interests: Declarations. Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests.
(© 2025. The Author(s).)