Research aims for autonomous robots that disassemble and remanufacture parts and products

The EPSRC is providing £1.94m for the five-year project led by mechanical engineers at Birmingham University.

They aim to gain a fundamental understanding of disassembly processes before developing systems that can autonomously handle variabilities in a product.

Principal investigator Prof Duc Pham told The Engineer: “In remanufacturing you need to take things apart as a first step. We want to understand how mechanically all the forces - the torques and so on - affect the success of the disassembly operation.

“When you take things apart, as a human being we sense the resistance and we modify our movements in order to overcome the resistance.”

Tasks will include unscrewing, removal of pins from holes with small clearances, separation of press-fit components, extracting elastic parts such as O-rings and circlips, and breaking up of 'permanently' assembled components.

Feedback will be used to help guide the robot and avoid damaging the components being taken apart. The basic process knowledge will be used to create models, scheduling algorithms and learning tools to enable autonomous or semi-autonomous disassembly by robotic systems.