An investigation on a robot system for disassembly automation

The traditional approach to automation and robotics has focused so far mainly on assembly problems, whereas the managing of manufactured products at the end of their life cycle has been almost entirely neglected. However, disassembly and recycling are becoming important factors as the ecological and economical implications of manufacturing raise increasing concerns. As an initial investigation of the very general problem of disassembly, in this paper the authors outline first the motivations and the potentially very important perspectives of this approach for robotics and automation research and for industrial application. Then the authors present a robotic system for the extraction, recognition and sorting of individual objects from an “agglomerate”. Such operations are of crucial importance in several disassembly tasks, such as recycling and raw materials recovering. The system is based on the integration of different sensory modalities with motor actions. An example of application of the system is described and experimental results are discussed