Intuitive teaching approach for robotic disassembly

Previous research has demonstrated the economic and environmental benefits of demanufacturing over complete product shredding prior to material separation and the importance of demanufacturing for rework, reuse, repair, remanufacture and recycling in the transition towards a more circular economy. Additionally, some products do not allow for the use of destructive processes during end-of-life treatment e.g., battery containing products. Therefore, automated disassembly is considered essential to increase the economic viability of the end-of-(first)-life treatment and to reduce working hazards during demanufacturing. However, automated demanufacturing requires dedicated and multi-functional tooling, and the programming of complex operations to disassemble and sort various fasteners, connectors, and components. Programming these robotic motions typically requires significant time and specific knowledge and skills. To avoid the need for highly trained personnel to teach all different product models, variants, and conditions, an intuitive interface with a low cost 6 degrees of freedom (DoF) SpaceMouse® sensor to guide a 6 DoF Stäubli robot is developed, together with the required communication principles. In addition, an experiment is set up to evaluate the developed teaching approach in terms of both the time gained and the achieved position accuracy. The study shows that the proposed intuitive teaching method leads to 57% faster teaching of locations with a limited decrease of 0.15mm in the position accuracy of the taught fastener locations, compared to the traditional pendant-based teaching approach.