Robots programmed to disassemble e-waste

In a project conducted by the UNSW School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering’s Sustainable Manufacturing and Life Cycle Engineering Research Group (SMLCE) and the School of Computer Science and Engineering, researchers have programmed industrial robots to break down the vast array of e-waste thrown out by Australians every year.

“There are millions of end-of-life products that we don’t know how to disassemble, despite legislation that tells us to do so,” said SMLCE founder and project leader Professor Sami Kara.

“The biggest problem is uncertainty - the number of different products coming into e-recycling centres and their condition.”

While humans can deal with product variety, it is still labour-intensive and costly to break down products one by one. It is also potentially hazardous owing to the risk of exposure to toxic materials used in electronics.

The researchers believe they can automate the entire process with cognitive robotics. The robots can learn and memorise how various electronic products, such as LED screens, are designed, enabling them to be quickly disassembled for recycling.

“The idea is to remove the display and printed circuit board without damaging them because the rest can be recycled,” said Professor Kara.

“They break one or two but then they learn and they don’t make the same mistake again.”

Furthermore, although the robot took some time to dismantle a screen it had never worked with before, Professor Kara said the next model only took minutes.

With the next phase of the research likely to involve industry trials, Professor Kara sees room to incorporate additional industrial robots into the set-up to handle e-waste as it is loaded or unloaded from the robot performing disassembly.

“You could isolate them in a cubicle, dump the screens in and have them work 24/7 non-stop,” he said.

It is believed similar techniques could be used to recycle lithium batteries, which can be volatile to disassemble.

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