TeknTrash Humanoid Robots — Company Profile, ALPHA Specs & Component Support

2021
Founded
London, UK
Headquarters
ALPHA
Flagship humanoid
Undisclosed
Funding raised
United Kingdom
Country
Private
Status

About TeknTrash Robotics

TeknTrash Robotics is a UK-based startup founded in 2021 with a very specific mission: automating waste handling — in industrial recycling plants first, and eventually in residential environments — through purpose-built humanoid robots. Headquartered at 1 Canada Square in London's Canary Wharf, the company is led by CEO Al Costa, who previously built and exited an AI and consumer-data platform called Stipra before pivoting TeknTrash toward physical robotics.

The premise behind TeknTrash is that waste handling — both on conveyor belts in materials recovery facilities and in more general logistics — is one of the most persistent labour problems in the modern economy. Recycling plants routinely operate 24 hours a day, expose workers to sharp objects, dust, biohazards, and repetitive strain, and struggle to retain staff. TeknTrash's thesis is that a mobile, dual-arm humanoid — not a fixed industrial arm — is the right form factor for that work, because a humanoid can move along conveyor lines, work in teams, carry bins, and eventually take on tasks in homes and warehouses without requiring the plant to redesign its infrastructure around a robot.

The company has moved quickly. In 2025 it began a headline pilot with the UK's Sharp Group, an environmental services provider whose Rainham facility in East London processes roughly 2,800 tonnes of material per week. TeknTrash published a joint case study with Google Cloud in 2025 describing ALPHA as a cloud-connected humanoid built on Google Cloud infrastructure, and its work with NVIDIA Isaac Lab to train the robot's manipulation policies has been covered by Recycling Today and the BBC. The company was also recognized by the World Economic Forum as one of the more impactful early-stage waste-management technologies. In late 2025 TeknTrash announced a Suzhou, China office (operating locally as "Titan Rui Technology") for robot assembly, testing, and regional R&D.

The competitive landscape around ALPHA is unusual. Most of the current humanoid robotics and AI boom — Tesla Optimus, Figure AI, Apptronik, 1X, Agility Robotics, Boston Dynamics Atlas, Unitree — is chasing general-purpose robots for manufacturing and logistics. TeknTrash is one of the very few pure-play humanoid manufacturers going after waste and recycling as a beachhead vertical, with an explicit Robots-as-a-Service (RaaS) commercial model rather than a traditional capex sale. It is that combination — a humanoid form factor, a hyperspectral-vision sensing stack, a cloud control plane called HoloLab, and a subscription pricing model benchmarked against local labour cost — that distinguishes the company from both traditional recycling-automation vendors and the broader general-purpose humanoid pack.

Product lineup: ALPHA and HoloLab

TeknTrash's core product is ALPHA — the Automated Litter Processing Humanoid Assistant — supported by the company's proprietary HoloLab training and control platform. Both are being validated together at Sharp Group's Rainham facility, with the pilot serving as the foundation for a broader rollout that TeknTrash has publicly targeted at up to 1,000 recycling plants across the UK and Europe.

ALPHA — Automated Litter Processing Humanoid Assistant

ALPHA is a dual-arm humanoid robot standing approximately 2 metres (200 cm) tall and weighing around 90 kg. Its upper body — chest, head, and two 6-DOF arms fitted with grippers — is mounted on a lifting column that travels one metre vertically, which itself sits on either a wheeled autonomous mobile base or a rail-guided base depending on the deployment. The two arms together can lift up to 5 kg of payload, and the robot targets a sorting rate of at least 42 picks per minute, roughly matching a human sorter. Runtime is up to 7 hours on a charge, with a 3-hour recharge and support for automatic charging so ALPHA can maintain 24/7 operation.

HoloLab — training and cloud control platform

HoloLab is TeknTrash's in-house training and monitoring system. Frontline recycling workers wear Meta Quest 3 headsets during their shift; HoloLab captures posture, hand and finger articulation, and synchronised video from their perspective, then uploads the demonstrations to the cloud. Data that passes quality metrics is fed into NVIDIA Isaac Lab to train a vision-language-action-style model that is then deployed back down to ALPHA units in the field. HoloLab also serves as the cloud-side monitoring and orchestration plane at runtime: a central camera stream tells each ALPHA unit which item on the belt it is responsible for, allowing groups of robots to coordinate on a single line.

Deployment options and business model

ALPHA is offered under a Robots-as-a-Service (RaaS) model rather than a traditional purchase: an implementation fee (publicly described as approximately £50,000) covers deployment, integration, and onboarding, followed by a 12-month maturity period with no additional operational fees. After that period, TeknTrash charges a monthly service fee benchmarked against the local labour cost of the role ALPHA works alongside. The RaaS model is architecturally tied to HoloLab — customers pay for continuous updates, remote support, and data services rather than a static hardware SKU.

Model	Year	Height	Weight	Payload	Battery/Runtime	Actuators	Notable
ALPHA (pilot)	2025	~200 cm	~90 kg	~5 kg	~7 hr / 3 hr charge	Electric BLDC, dual 6-DOF arms (13 DOF total)	Hyperspectral vision; NVIDIA Orin AGX; Sharp Group Rainham pilot
ALPHA next-gen	Planned	TBD	TBD	TBD	TBD	Custom in-house	Purpose-built for waste handling; Suzhou R&D + assembly

Technology stack

ALPHA is architected as a cloud-connected humanoid, not a fully autonomous edge-only robot. Perception, low-level control, and safety run onboard; higher-level task assignment, fleet coordination, and model training run in the cloud through HoloLab. That architectural choice — humanoid form factor plus cloud brain plus a subscription commercial model — is what most clearly separates ALPHA from both classical robotic-arm sorters and general-purpose humanoids.

Perception

ALPHA's sensing stack is heavier than a typical humanoid because the target task — identifying dirty, damaged, mixed materials on a fast-moving conveyor belt — is harder than typical warehouse picking. The robot uses hyperspectral cameras that capture data beyond the visible spectrum (including infrared bands) so it can distinguish material types even when items are contaminated or partially destroyed. That is supplemented by a 3D depth camera with an 85° × 58° field of view (0.25 m to 2.5 m depth range) between the arms, a binocular head camera on a pitch/rotation joint for obstacle awareness, LiDAR, ultrasonic sensors, an IMU, and motor encoders in the mobile base. A separate camera at the start of the conveyor belt tracks material as it enters the line and assigns each item to a specific ALPHA unit further downstream.

AI, control, and HoloLab

Training is data-driven and imitation-based. Human sorters wearing Meta Quest 3 headsets capture demonstrations that HoloLab converts into training data for NVIDIA Isaac Lab, generating manipulation policies that are then deployed back onto ALPHA units. TeknTrash has also publicly discussed exploring Google's Gemini Robotics and vision-language-action models such as NVIDIA GR00T, and it lists DeepSeek-based LLM integration on the current configuration. Real-time task assignment across a fleet of ALPHA units — which robot picks which item — is orchestrated by HoloLab in the cloud, on top of Google Cloud Storage, Cloud Data Fusion, and Compute Engine, with more than 49 TB of imaging and sorting data already accumulated in the pilot phase.

Actuators, power, and compute

Onboard compute is centred on an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin module — a 12-core Arm Cortex-A78AE CPU, an Ampere GPU with 2,048 CUDA cores and 64 Tensor cores, and up to 275 TOPS of AI performance — running Ubuntu 24.04 and ROS 2. Each arm is a 6-DOF electric BLDC manipulator (motors and gearing supplied through RealMan Robotics on the current pilot configuration, with TeknTrash publicly stating an intent to move beyond off-the-shelf hardware to a fully custom humanoid built in-house at its Suzhou facility). The mobile base uses BLDC drive motors with encoders, ultrasonic safety edges, and an IMU for autonomous navigation, obstacle avoidance, mapping, and automatic charging. The whole platform is Wi-Fi-connected by design because HoloLab is not optional — cloud connectivity is part of the operating model.

The electrical stack behind a dual-arm humanoid like ALPHA is much closer to an automotive-grade traction system than to a desktop robot. Each joint's servo controller must deliver hundreds of watts of instantaneous torque without thermally throttling on a 24/7 duty cycle, which drives the use of high-efficiency wide-bandgap semiconductors — SiC and GaN — in the motor-driver stages, paired with tightly matched precision passives on every gate-drive and current-sense channel. The onboard battery pack integrates cell balancing, thermal management, and multi-stage protection ICs to sustain a seven-hour runtime and repeatable 3-hour recharge, and the entire high-current path is blanketed in MLCC capacitors and precision current-sense resistors that keep the loop stable as loads swing between idle and peak torque.

Applications and commercial deployments

TeknTrash's initial market is materials recovery facilities — the plants that receive mixed household and commercial recyclables and separate them into paper, plastic, glass, and metal streams. Longer-term, the company's stated ambition is any environment where waste is handled, including warehouses, industrial sites, and eventually homes.

Sharp Group — Rainham, East London. ALPHA's flagship pilot, launched in 2025, at a UK materials recovery facility processing roughly 2,800 tonnes of material per week. The pilot combines HoloLab-based data capture from Sharp Group's frontline workers, cloud training on NVIDIA Isaac Lab, and on-site sorting by ALPHA units. Sharp Group is intended to serve as the launchpad for ALPHA's broader UK and European rollout.
UK and European recycling plants — planned rollout. TeknTrash has publicly targeted up to 1,000 recycling plants across the UK and Europe over the next 24–48 months, with each plant contributing operational data back into the shared training loop.
Adjacent industrial and residential tasks. Because ALPHA is a general dual-arm humanoid, TeknTrash has publicly demonstrated the platform performing tasks well outside recycling — folding towels, lifting boxes, and moving material at industrial sites — as a step toward warehouse and home use.
Tyre recycling and industrial vision — earlier deployments. Before the ALPHA pilot, TeknTrash deployed high-speed YOLO-based camera systems at a large tyre recycling facility in Madrid to detect contamination and protect machinery, an engagement the company continues to reference as validation of its vision stack.

The robotics supply chain — where Hybrid Electronics fits in

A modern humanoid robot is one of the most component-dense products ever built. A single ALPHA-class platform depends on thousands of individual electronic components: precision BLDC motor drivers for each of the 13 arm and column joints, IMUs and MEMS motion sensors, LiDAR and ultrasonic modules on the mobile base, hyperspectral and 3D depth cameras on the upper body, GPU compute boards such as the NVIDIA Jetson Orin AGX, battery-management ICs, wide-bandgap SiC and GaN power semiconductors in the motor-driver stage, high-speed board-to-board connectors, precision resistors, and thousands of MLCC capacitors distributed across every power and signal rail.

Building that kind of hardware puts enormous pressure on the electronic-components supply chain. Prototype pilots and low-volume production runs frequently hit allocation, EOL notices, and long lead times on the exact parts they need, and R&D and field-service teams routinely have to support older platforms that use semiconductors no longer in mainstream distribution. During the current humanoid robotics and general-purpose robot AI boom, this pressure is amplified: dozens of well-funded teams are chasing the same short list of high-torque BLDC drivers, precision IMUs, GPU compute modules, hyperspectral image sensors, and automotive-grade power semiconductors, and franchise stock on many key parts is now measured in months of lead time rather than weeks.

Hybrid Electronics has been sourcing electronic components for industrial and embedded systems since 1995. For robotics teams — humanoid, mobile, industrial, and research — we specialize in finding the parts you need when mainstream distribution can't:

Obsolete and end-of-life parts

Legacy semiconductors, sensors, connectors, and passives that are no longer in mainstream distribution — the parts that keep older platforms running during transitions to newer hardware, and the long-tail items that block a BOM from closing.

Allocated and hard-to-find active parts

High-torque BLDC motor drivers, IMUs and MEMS sensors, SiC/GaN power devices, GPU compute modules, precision resistors, and MLCC capacitors caught in allocation or long-lead times. Send us a BOM or a shortage list — we'll confirm what we can source and at what lead time.

Frequently asked questions

Who founded TeknTrash Robotics?

TeknTrash Robotics is led by CEO Al Costa and was founded in 2021 as a UK-based robotics startup focused on waste handling. The company is headquartered at 1 Canada Square in London and has since opened a regional office in Suzhou, China — operating locally as "Titan Rui Technology" — for robot assembly, testing, and local R&D.

What is ALPHA?

ALPHA — Automated Litter Processing Humanoid Assistant — is TeknTrash's humanoid robot designed to sort waste and recyclables in industrial recycling plants. It stands roughly 200 cm tall, features two 6-DOF arms with grippers on a wheeled or rail-guided base, uses hyperspectral vision plus a 3D depth camera and LiDAR, and runs on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin AGX compute module. It targets a sorting rate of at least 42 picks per minute and up to 7 hours of runtime per charge.

Where is ALPHA being deployed?

ALPHA's flagship pilot is at Sharp Group's recycling facility in Rainham, East London, which processes roughly 2,800 tonnes of material per week. The Sharp Group deployment is intended as a launchpad for a broader rollout, with TeknTrash publicly targeting up to 1,000 recycling plants across the UK and Europe over the next 24–48 months.

How is ALPHA priced and sold?

ALPHA is offered under a Robots-as-a-Service (RaaS) model rather than a traditional capex purchase. TeknTrash has publicly described an implementation fee of approximately £50,000 covering deployment, integration, and onboarding, followed by a 12-month maturity period with no additional operational fees. After that period, TeknTrash charges a monthly service fee benchmarked against the labour cost of the human role ALPHA works alongside. Continuous software and AI upgrades are included.

Is Hybrid Electronics affiliated with TeknTrash?

No. Hybrid Electronics is an independent electronic-components sourcing company. We are not a distributor, reseller, or partner of TeknTrash Robotics. All trademarks are property of their respective owners. Hybrid supports robotics developers by sourcing obsolete, allocated, and hard-to-find semiconductors, sensors, connectors, and passives for R&D, prototype, and low-volume production builds.

Can Hybrid help with components for humanoid robotics builds?

Yes. We regularly support R&D and integrator teams with hard-to-find semiconductors, BLDC motor-driver ICs, IMUs and other MEMS sensors, connectors, SiC/GaN power devices, and precision passives for the industrial and embedded boards used in robotics platforms. Send us a BOM or a short list of shortages and we'll confirm availability and pricing.

Trademark and affiliation notice. TeknTrash®, ALPHA, and HoloLab are trademarks of TeknTrash Ltd. Hybrid Electronics is an independent electronic-components sourcing company and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or authorized by TeknTrash Ltd. All information on this page is compiled from public sources for educational and reference purposes.