Requirements for robot assisted disassembly of not appropriately designed electronic products: lessons from first studies

For environmental and economical reasons future applications in automation may focus on robot assisted disassembly of a large variety of electronic products with the general aim to re-use valuable modules, sub-assemblies and components recovered from old products. This paper presents first activities, investigations and experiments in applying intelligent robots to autonomous disassembly of electronic products. In particular the structure of a flexible robot system, including suitable actuators and sensors is developed and disassembly difficulties which arose in the first experiments are analysed. As a representative example for electronic products a video camera recorder has been selected for practical disassembly experiments. The robot system used within this research work comprises a six-axes robot arm a three-fingered dexterous gripper, a two-jaw-gripper, a wrist force/torque-sensor and a multicamera imaging system