Smart disassembly cell for circularity: Turn industry 4.0 technologies for disassembly and recovery of components.

Abstract

Circular Economy initiatives have introduced a solution demand for the treatment of End of Life (EoL) products, switching from shredding and material recycling to the recovery of modules/components that remain functional. The process needs product recovery and diagnostic, disassembly, and requalification. These tasks are today carried out by human labour due to their complexity and uncertainties concerning the working conditions of the received product. But it implies time and costs that hardly balance the economical balance in developed countries context. Human – Cobot collaborative disassembly are promising solution to overcome the uncertainties without compromising the flexibility and the rate of disassembly operation. The Smart Disassembly Cell for Circularity (SDC2) project aims to provide a semi–automated disassembly solution for EoL electronic products. This paper portrays the requirements for the implementation of a Human-Cobot collaborative cell for electronic products. The goal of this project is to implement a shared workplace where the robot and the worker can work in parallel or share a common task with safe interaction. A literature study on available solutions was made. From there, the study and implementation of the decision system, database and service platform started. This document describes the function of the database and decision system as well as the service platform to establish global communication. MySQL and Python with the FLASK package were used to frame the database and service platform, Genetic algorithm was implemented for providing the robotic disassembly planning solution. A case study using a personal computer and a Power inverter was conducted to verify the development in each stage. The systems are under development with an aim to provide a global disassembly cell which will be able to disassemble various products rather than focusing on a specific product.