This robot uses AI to pull screws out of old TVs — and it could transform e-waste recycling

As Americans continuously upgrade their TVs for newer models and toss their old ones, it creates a serious problem: too many of them are ending up in recycling facilities, leaving processors struggling to handle the volume.

RoboLoop is stepping in to solve the problem, with sustainability and circularity in mind. The Pittsburgh startup was founded in January 2025 by Matthew Travers, a senior systems scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, and Ned Eldridge, founder and CEO of tech management company ELoop. RoboLoop combines robotics and artificial intelligence to accelerate e-waste disassembly — and eventually put those recycled materials back into use.

While the goal is for automation to drive efficiency, RoboLoop isn’t looking to replace humans, the founders told Technical.ly. 

“We want to be the solution in the middle that has some of the fidelity of the humans with some of the speed of the automation,” Travers said, “so that we can, with very high efficacy and very high efficiency, be able to actually go in and not just do classical recycling and recovery.”

At RoboLoop’s State College facility, recycled flat panel TVs are weighed, categorized and sorted for processing. Guided by computer vision, a type of AI that allows computers to identify and understand visual information, the robot locates and removes screws. Workers feed the machines the devices and gather the materials at the end of the processing.

The current RoboLoop robot, PL1, locates and removes screws from the backs of flat panel televisions, making the process nearly five times faster, the team said.

Almost two years after its initial inception, RoboLoop collects around 400,000 pounds of recycled televisions a month from around 14 customers across Pennsylvania, New Jersey, DC and New York and hopes to scale it forward. Now finalizing a licensing agreement with Carnegie Mellon University and seeking its first round of investors, the company is working to reach positive cash flow, according to Eldridge.

E-waste and robotics experts connect for a new approach 

The idea for RoboLoop’s technology was initially started in 2023 by Eldridge at his e-waste recycling center, ELoop, while trying to find solutions to process scrap more efficiently. 

In the spring of 2023, ELoop introduced a robot from Ireland, the FPD Pro, to control and remove hazardous materials found inside, such as mercury, which poses health risks to workers. 

However, Eldridge wanted to find a way to automate the disassembly process even further. 

“I didn’t get a productivity benefit like I expected,” he said. “When you start looking at these TVs, the most onerous aspect of them is taking out all the screws, and all this was doing was cutting out the front screen, and then putting it in front of laborers with screw guns to finish the job.”

Six months later, Eldridge and his team were introduced to Travers and they got to work on building what is now their first model.

“They took an interest in e-waste, I took a bigger interest in robots,” Eldridge said. “Here we are in March of 2025 taking that technology into our State College operation so that we can do a very effective job of dismantling electronic equipment.”

The project initially began within ELoop before it officially became a separate company in January 2025, with Eldridge as its first financer and bringing on now co-owner Scott Thayer, the CEO and founder of Automap.

Tackling zero waste in Pittsburgh

As e-waste becomes one of the fastest-growing waste streams in the world, cities like Pittsburgh are taking on the challenge to do their parts with the help of startups like RoboLoop. 

Pittsburgh is striving to increase its waste diversion and go zero waste by 2030, and Eldridge said he sees RoboLoop becoming an integral part of getting there.

“I think we’re going to be easy for recyclers to adopt to use our facility,” he said. “We believe the manufacturers, eventually, are going to see the merit of what we’re doing, and they’re going to send their collectors to our processing.”

The City of Pittsburgh is already one of RoboLoop’s customers, bringing all of the recycled flat panel TVs from Allegheny County to the State College facility, but the team said they have a vision for their technology to expedite e-waste recycling across more regions. 

A circular vision for tech reuse

Travers and Eldridge see a big future for RoboLoop. They envision the technology to take on more than just the external disassembly process and hope to soon improve the robot to disassemble more parts and materials from more devices. 

The team is building RoboLoop with scalability in mind, they said.

“The machine that’s deployed has been built from the ground on up to support scalability, and for us, that comes down to manufacture and then maintenance,” Travers said. 

The machines’ components are low-cost, accessible and easy to replace, according to the founders. Most of its parts can be found at a local hardware store like Home Depot, making RoboLoop’s machinery accessible for other processors to buy and adopt their technology, Travers said.

RoboLoop’s philosophy is built around circularity, a concept that focuses on how products can be recycled and reused to reduce waste. Beyond streamlining external disassembly, they’re hoping to go a step further. The team said they’re working toward a model of the robot that can recover and sell valuable materials such as indium, which can be worth over $700 per kilogram, and used for future devices. 

“I think that’s going to separate us in the marketplace,” Eldridge said, “so we are the definition of circularity and sustainability.”