Intelligent disassembly system for end-of-life product using human robot collaboration on a digital twin platform

Abstract

Nowadays, with the development of green manufacturing and circular economics, the recycling and re-utilization of End-Of-Life (EOL) products and related resources have gradually been paid attention to accomplish the sustainable and green production and re-manufacturing. The disassembly as an important step in the recycling of EOL products can provide the automation and intelligent technology based on robot controls and data management that can accomplish many complex and heavy re-manufacturing tasks. Due to the high complexity and diversity of disassembly objects, manual disassembly is difficult to accomplish the economically efficient disassembly towards massive EOL products. Therefore, the robot application has many advantages on dealing with complex disassembly operations but resulting in enough not flexible disassembly to reduce the efficiency at certain extent. This work proposes a digital twin-assisted multi-agent human and robot collaboration (HRC) disassembly system platform for uncertain and dynamic conditions. This method discusses the flexibility and intelligence of human involvement as operators, while the repeatability and high accuracy of robot disassembly can deal with complicated disassembly tasks. By combining digital twin data platform, it can be easily solving the problems of real-time disassembly process data management and the dynamic disassembly task allocation that can be used to improve the effectiveness of disassembly operations focusing primarily on a case of retired electric vehicle battery structure.