Pellerin Laundry Machinery Inc. Sales Co., Inc. (PLMSCO) has reached an agreement with sewts, a Munich-based physical AI company, to bring the latter company’s soil-sorting robots to North America.
“Seven years and 70 robots taught us one thing: Textiles don’t follow rules, and neither can the systems that handle them,” said Alex Bremer, co-founder and CEO of sewts. “The U.S. laundry industry is facing the same labor and cost pressures we’ve spent years solving for our European customers. We’re bringing that experience to North America with a partner who knows this market better than anyone.”
PLMSCO President Jean-Marc Pellerin added that he’s impressed with the soil-sorting automation that sewts has developed, including its ORDO sorting robots. “In all my years in this industry, I have never seen anything quite like what sewts is doing,” Pellerin said. “ORDO handles the kind of variability that has stumped automation for decades. Our customers have been asking for a real answer to soiled-side labor for a long time, and we believe this is it.”
PLMSCO and sewts GmbH, have unveiled a distribution partnership that will allow PLMSCO to bring ORDO – sewts’ autonomous soiled-side sorting robot – to the North American market. PLMSCO will serve as the exclusive distributor for ORDO across North America, providing installation, service and operational support to industrial laundry customers starting later this year, the release said.
Soil sorting has long posed challenges for laundry operators due to the physically demanding nature of the job, and high turnover it often generates. ORDO is designed to address these issues directly, the release said. Operating on the soiled side, the robot identifies, picks and sorts textiles by category at industrial speed – running continuously without fatigue, sick days, or turnover. Early deployments show the potential to reduce soil-side sorting operating expenses by up to 50%. In response to questions from Textile Services Weekly, the companies added that “The system is designed to the highest industrial safety standards, including physical guarding and sensor-based features.” The robots will work within fencing to safeguard employees, the companies said.
As for size, the companies added that, “ORDO is a compact, self-contained unit designated to integrate into existing laundry sorting layouts without requiring infrastructure changes.”
Power for ORDO is provided by JUPITER, sewts’ proprietary world model, trained on hundreds of millions of real textile interactions, the release said. The system provides the skills that experienced soil-sort employees use to ensure high productivity and quality sorting. In other words, the robots can adapt to changing conditions. “Unlike rule-based systems that fail when confronted with variable soiling, tangled bundles, or mixed materials, JUPITER reasons about how textiles behave – adapting to new garments and plant conditions without retraining,” the release said. The system is widely used in Europe. More than 70 robots are currently deployed for several large European customers, including Elis, Bardusch and Greif.
Throughput using the ORDO robots is expected to match that of experienced soil-sort employees, while freeing up staff in this department for “higher-value” tasks, the release said
For more information, contact Sara-Victoria Place at sara.place@pellerinlaundry.com
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