Industry 4.0 and Prospects of Circular Economy: A Survey of Robotic Assembly and Disassembly

TL;DR

This paper surveys robotic assembly and disassembly within Industry 4.0, emphasizing their roles in supporting a circular economy and highlighting overlooked factors such as robot types and ecosystem integration.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review of robotic assembly/disassembly and discusses their importance in sustainable manufacturing and circular economy frameworks.

Findings

Robotic assembly/disassembly are crucial for sustainable manufacturing.

Current literature overlooks robot types and ecosystem factors.

Integrating these aspects enhances circular economy support.

Abstract

Despite their contributions to the financial efficiency and environmental sustainability of industrial processes, robotic assembly and disassembly have been understudied in the existing literature. This is in contradiction to their importance in realizing the Fourth Industrial Revolution. More specifically, although most of the literature has extensively discussed how to optimally assemble or disassemble given products, the role of other factors has been overlooked. For example, the types of robots involved in implementing the sequence plans, which should ideally be taken into account throughout the whole chain consisting of design, assembly, disassembly and reassembly. Isolating the foregoing operations from the rest of the components of the relevant ecosystems may lead to erroneous inferences toward both the necessity and efficiency of the underlying procedures. In this paper we try to alleviate these shortcomings by comprehensively investigating the state-of-the-art in robotic assembly and disassembly. We consider and review various aspects of manufacturing and remanufacturing frameworks while particularly focusing on their desirability for supporting a circular economy.