A Review of Prospects and Opportunities in Disassembly with Human-Robot Collaboration

TL;DR

This paper reviews the potential of human-robot collaboration to improve product disassembly processes, highlighting recent advances, challenges, and opportunities across technology, human workers, and work practices.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review of recent progress in HRC disassembly, identifying key challenges and opportunities for future research and implementation.

Findings

HRC can enhance disassembly efficiency and safety.

Significant technological and human factors challenges remain.

Multidisciplinary research is needed to address current gaps.

Abstract

Product disassembly plays a crucial role in the recycling, remanufacturing, and reuse of end-of-use (EoU) products. However, the current manual disassembly process is inefficient due to the complexity and variation of EoU products. While fully automating disassembly is not economically viable given the intricate nature of the task, there is potential in using human-robot collaboration (HRC) to enhance disassembly operations. HRC combines the flexibility and problem-solving abilities of humans with the precise repetition and handling of unsafe tasks by robots. Nevertheless, numerous challenges persist in technology, human workers, and remanufacturing work, that require comprehensive multidisciplinary research to bridge critical gaps. These challenges have motivated the authors to provide a detailed discussion on the opportunities and obstacles associated with introducing HRC to disassembly. In this regard, the authors have conducted a thorough review of the recent progress in HRC disassembly and present the insights gained from this analysis from three distinct perspectives: technology, workers, and work.