A Hybrid Human-Robot Collaborative Environment for Recycling Electrical and Electronic Equipment

Abstract

In this paper, a novel hybrid human-robot recycling plant for electrical and electronic equipment is introduced. The proposed system will be developed in the context of the European research project HR-Recycler and its goal is to offer a hybrid collaboration environment for humans and robots. Through this collaboration, several currently manual, expensive, hazardous and time-consuming tasks of WEEE materials pre-processing will be substituted by automatic robotic-based procedures (categorization of electric/electronic devices, disassembling them, sorting of device components), before the materials enter the fine shredding machine. Although several solutions have been proposed for automation of recycling other types of waste (e.g. domestic), the industrial application case of WEEE recycling poses significant challenges and it is the first time, to the best of our knowledge, that a hybrid human-robot solution is proposed to address this problem.