Flexible disassembly with industrial robots

The increasing amounts of waste in Western Europe are becoming more and more an issue of high importance. In consequence, legislation of many countries is becoming increasingly strict heading towards a life-cycle strategy that involves different concepts for product recycling. All recycling processes for complex products require a disassembly of the product. Hence, Automation of the disassembly process is becoming an important challenge. In contrast to the state of the art of flexible assembly automation, disassembly for recycling today is mainly a manual and, to some extent, mechanized process. Focussing on electrical and electronical devices the paper introduces the concept of a flexible disassembly cell based upon the industrial robot. A methodology is presented to approach both disassembly system design and disassembly sequence control based upon a product line analysis and a disassembly technology database. A flexible robot cell for the disassembly of telephones for remanufacturin g is presented focussing on - Planning and Design of a flexible disassembly cell - Experimental Analysis of selected automated disassembly processes - Conclusions towards Design for Disassembly (DFD).