Non-destructive Disassembly Research Articles

Automatic PC disassembly for component recovery

In this article, a personal computer disassembly cell is presented. With this cell, a certain degree of automatism is afforded for the non-destructive disassembly process and for the recycling of these kinds of mass-produced electronic products. Each component of the product can be separated. The disassembly cell is composed of several sub-systems, each of which is dedicated to the planning and execution of one type of task. A computer vision system is employed for the recognition and localisation of the product and of each of its components. The disassembly system proposed here also has a modelling system for the products and each of its components, the information necessary for the planning of tasks, generating the disassembly sequence and planning of the disassembly movements. These systems co-operate with each other to achieve a semi-automatic disassembly of the product.

Non-Destructive Disassembly Robot Cell for Demanufacturing Automation

Product disassembly for reusing or recycling can be done in a destructive or not-destructive way. Furthermore, to achieve an automatic disassembly, a robot arm has to be considered for doing the desired task. This paper presents the structure of a flexible automatic-demanufacturing system which includes a robot arm for the disassembly tasks. This paper makes special emphasis on how the fusion of the information from the sequence planner with the information from the movement generator can be used to take a robot arm into consideration, which accomplishes the disassembly tasks. Finally, the automatic disassembly concepts are used for the disassembly of a laptop PC.

Vision assisted disassembly using a dexterous hand-arm-system: An example and experimental results

Future applications in automation of non-destructive disassembly processes - necessary and important for re-use of components - require highly sensorized and dexterous robot systems. The main elements of the presented system are a disassembly sequence planner using special elementary disassembly operations, a redundant hand-arm-system with fifteen degrees of freedom supplied by a six-axes robot and a three-fingered gripper, and a vision system used for offline grasp and motion planning as well as for online supervision. Besides a description of the overall system structure and explanation of the underlying ideas for special disassembly operations, the presentation of first results and experiences from disassembling some parts of a video camera recorder will be one of the centred points to be discussed.