Flexible multi-sensorial system for automatic disassembly using cooperative robots

Abstract

Flexible multisensorial systems are a very important issue in the current industry when disassembling and recycling tasks have to be performed. These tasks can be performed by a human operator or by a robot system. In the current paper a robotic system to perform the required tasks is presented. This system takes into consideration the distribution of the necessary tasks to perform the disassembly of a component using several robots in a parallel or in a cooperative way. The algorithm proposed to distribute the task among robots takes into consideration the characteristics of each task and the sequence that needs to be followed to perform the required disassembly of the product. Furthermore, this paper presents a disassembly system based on a sensorized cooperative robots interaction framework for the planning of movements and detections of objects in the disassembly tasks. To determine the sequence of the disassembly of some products, a new strategy to distribute a set of tasks among robots is presented. Subsequently, the visual detection system used for detecting targets and characteristics is described. To carry out this detection process, different well known strategies, such as matching templates, polygonal approach and edge detection, are applied. Finally, a visual-force control system has been implemented in order to track disassembly trajectories. An important aspect of this system is the processing of the sensorial information in order to guarantee coherence. This aspect allows the application of both sensors, visual and force sensors, co-ordinately to disassembly tasks. The proposed system is validated by experiments using several types of components such as the covers of batteries and electronic circuits from toys, and drives and screws from PCs.

Keywords:

• Automatic disassembly
• Cooperative robots
• Recognition
• Visual control
• Force control

Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the Spanish MCYT project ‘Diseño, implementación y experimentación de escenarios de manipulación inteligentes para aplicaciones de ensamblado y desensamblado automático (DPI2005- 06222)’ and by the project ‘DESAURO: Desensamblado Automático Selectivo para Reciclado mediante Robots Cooperativos y Sistema Multisensorial’ (DPI2002-02103).