Towards Automated Disassembly for Battery Removal of Robot Vacuum Cleaners

The annual amount of electronic waste is increasing worldwide, and the number of battery-powered electrical appliances, such as Robot Vacuum Cleaners (RVCs), is also on the rise. The current state-of-the-art disposal process involves collection, partial disassembly, shredding, and subsequent sorting, which currently does not prioritize batteries, leading to fre incidents. Furthermore, this process does not guarantee that other value-preserving recycling methods can directly reuse materials as recyclate. Rather than having humans perform this dirty and hazardous task, robot-based disassembly could serve as a new and effective treatment to address these issues. This paper presents a case study of a critical step: the robot-based removal of batteries from RVCs. The proposed solution is a robust and modular robotic cell that fully automates the removal of spring terminal batteries from RVCs once a user feeds the object into the cell. The disassembly process consists of screw detection, unfastening, removal of the battery cover, and finally, removal of the battery. For this objective, we use a force-controlled skill-based robot programming framework combined with computer vision-based detection and comprehensive error handling strategies. Using the robot cell, we achieved an 81% success rate in the entire pipeline for different models.