Alexandra Weigl

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.<<ETX>>

Vision Assisted Disassembly Using a Dexterous Hand-Arm-System: An Example and Experimental Results

Abstract 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.

Combining Visual, Tactile and Range Sensor Information to Increase the Autonomy of Robots

Up to now, most industrial robots employ sensors just to measure their internal state and to keep their end-effector on a desired trajectory. However, sensors monitoring contact situations and/or giving information about the environment can enhance the capabilities of robot manipulators. Reasons, why they are not used in general are additional costs, sceptism about their reliability, limitations in the robot controllers and computational burden. But cost reductions in sensor hardware as well as the development of industrial interfaces to Personal Computers with their rich environment of easily handable software has changed this picture. The exploitation of the abilities of further sensors has opened a large field of new robot applications in industry — e.g. robot assisted disassembly — as well as in direct human support, the broad field of so-called service robotics.