Towards Circular Economy: Process Description, Requirements, and Data Set for Robot-based Disassembly of Small Electrical Appliances

European countries generate approximately 4.7 million tons of electrical waste annually. The generated electrical waste includes an increasing number of battery-operated electrical devices such as robotic vacuum cleaners, which contain valuable components like electrical motors and battery systems. However, environmental and economic concerns require alternative treatment strategies besides shredding and sorting, which is the current state-of-the-art technology. Robot-based disassembly might be an alternative strategy to gain valuable and possibly reusable components. The requirements of the disassembly processes must be given to design novel robot-based solutions and identify relevant future research areas. For this, a quantitative examination of end-of-life (EOL) robot vacuum cleaners is carried out to collect the expected handling and disassembly steps, including the product state. Accompanying this paper, an open-source data set with 37 manual and complete disassembly experiments from 21 RVC manufacturers (incl. 1.113 images) for scientific and industrial usage is published. Therefore, the required disassembly processes, expected states, joining technologies, robot dimension, battery capacity, and partial functional test results are provided. On this basis, disassembly processes, challenges, and requirements for a robot-based solution are identified and a cell layout is proposed. This procedure can be applied to the disassembly of other unknown EOL products.