Rose City Robotics · Portland, Oregon
We're a battery recycling research company. We build robotic systems — trained by expert human technicians — that disassemble end-of-life EV battery packs: recovering more value than shredding, without putting people next to high-voltage fire risks.
Shred it, or risk someone.
Recyclers face a bad tradeoff. Manual disassembly recovers the most value but puts technicians next to thermal-runaway fires and lethal voltage. Whole-pack shredding is safer for people and scales — but it burns energy, consumes chemicals, and grinds reusable modules into lower-value feedstock.
Disassemble first. Recover more.
Our robots are trained by expert technicians through teleoperation, then run autonomously. Packs come apart into modules, cells, and components — sorted for second life or recycling. Cleaner feedstock, lower transport costs per pound of critical material, and no human inside the hazard zone.
An expert technician disassembles the pack remotely. The battery sits in an isolated, nitrogen-blanketed cell; the human never gets near it.
Every teardown is training data. Transformer neural networks — the ALOHA/ACT lineage from Stanford — learn disassembly skills from human demonstrations, no per-pack programming.
The robot works packs on its own. When it hits something novel, a human takes over, finishes the job, and the robot learns from the intervention.
Our DOE prize application was built with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (evaluation partner), Cirba Solutions, American Battery Technologies, Ecobat, Daimler Trucks NA, Orange EV, Navistar, Lico Materials, Polaris Battery Labs, Loupe Robotics, and Portland State University.
Research notes, disassembly experiments, and company news.
Rose City Robotics is one of eight winners of the DOE's Lithium-Ion Battery Recycling Prize Breakthrough Contest, earning $200,000 and advancing to Phase IV for our work on robotic EV battery disassembly.
A backstage tour at BattleBots taught us the real meaning of production-ready robotics — every BattleBot has a fully fired-up backup ready to go on the sideline. What that means for humanoid demos and robotic battery disassembly.
