Toolchain for Automated Disassembly for Recycling of Electric Vehicle Batteries

Abstract

In the context of the increasing focus on the circular economy and the importance of responsible use of resources, more and more attention is being paid to disassembly. While today a large part of the products are shredded and recycled as a single unit, individual components of complex products must be dismantled to reuse or recycle their materials by type. As disassembly is still done manually for many products today, this is only cost-effective for a few. To accelerate the planning process for disassembly and to make automated disassembly using multi-functional robot cells more lucrative, this paper presents a toolchain consisting of a disassembly planning assistant on the one hand and a robot programming assistant on the other. The goal is to simplify and accelerate disassembly planning. As input data, the toolchain receives the product model in a neutral data format and determines disassembly-relevant information from it. A GUI enables the manual adaptation of the data as well as the addition of additional information that cannot be extracted directly from the product model. This information is passed on to a simulation environment, which can be used to intuitively create a template program for a robot in a disassembly cell offline. In addition, evaluation criteria are derived to validate the toolchain.