Ceit – Automated disassembly system for recovery of critical materials
Ceit
Sector: Industry
Business Case
Robotic assembly tasks are well established in industry, but automated disassembly is not. There is a lack of automation in this process and it has been identified as one of the great environmental and technological challenges of the next decade. The recycling of WEEE (Waste from Electrical and Electronic Equipment) is therefore an obligation, but also an opportunity, as it allows the recovery of valuable materials that would otherwise be lost through recycling or recovery as secondary raw material, while reducing the environmental impact and resource consumption involved in the extraction of virgin elements and their subsequent processing for the manufacture of primary materials.
Objectives
Develop intelligent machine vision (CV) and robotics technologies for the assembly and disassembly of WEEE components. The system consists of a flexible cell for industrial assembly and disassembly where the combination of robotic, machine vision and AI technologies can undertake the handling of components in dynamic and unstructured environments, facilitating these operations that today can only be carried out manually. The products to be recovered are batteries and items containing Neodymium magnets.
Use case
The proposed hardware structure is based on a high IP grade industrial robot with force/torque control. A 6-axis force/torque sensor with an automatic tool changer is mounted on the robot flange. The use of different types of tools is proposed so that the robot is able to tackle a wide variety of WEEE dismantling operations: Pincer/clamp, suction cups, screwdriver, drill, rotaflex or similar for cutting operations,, etc. In addition, the robot has an optical system to obtain a perception of the environment and guide the robot in handling tasks.
Infrastructure
Hybrid
Technology
Automatic or Deep Learning Image recognition/processing
Data
Internet Datasets Videos of the work environment
