Former NASA-JPL engineer launches cannabis industry's first automated pre-roll infusion robot, Jiko

Sorting Robotics, an industrial cannabis-focused AI and computer vision technologies company, launched Jiko. Jiko is the cannabis industry’s first automated pre-roll infusion robot.

Approximately 70% of all cannabis manufacturing is still being done by hand, and will result in about $2B manufacturing labor spend in 2022–significantly eating into operators’ bottom-lines. With Jiko’s ability to infuse up to 800 pre-rolls per hour and reduce waste and spillage by approximately 20%-30%, Jiko has been engineered to help operators boost margins, scale, and achieve profitability. (Benzinga)

Companies using Jiko have reported being able to scale production from 10,000 to 40,0000 infused pre-rolls per month, and saving over $20,000 in labor and spillage costs during the first month of use.

“I want a world where all repetitive manual labor tasks are done autonomously; then people can focus their efforts on helping others and being creative,” stated Nohtal Partansky, co-founder and CEO, Sorting Robotics.

“Most people think robots are a bad thing. I see it completely differently. In the cannabis value chain, effectively automating repetitive manual tasks improves margins and allows operators to reinvest more into innovation and creative problem solving.”

Nohtal, a former NASA-JPL Engineer assigned to the MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In Situ Resource Utilization Experiment) project, co-founded Sorting Robotics to break through the toughest bottlenecks of cannabis brands and processors through a combination of real-time production data analytics, modern IoT hardware, and precision automation.

by Vuk Zdinjak