Robotic disassembly involves several research topics such as Task and Motion Planning (TAMP), robot tool design, and robot sensor-guided motion. Battery pack disassembly is a part of this field of applications as a practical approach to preserving operators’ safety and health by coping with the high variability of products [38, 64].
Battery pack disassembly is a part of this field of applications as a practical approach to preserving operators’ safety and health by coping with the high variability of products [38, 64]. However, most authors agree that a fully automatic battery pack disassembly is not feasible with the current constraints [17, 21, 37, 41, 56].
The analysis highlights that a complete automatic disassembly remains difficult, while human-robot collaborative disassembly guarantees high flexibility and productivity. The paper introduces guidelines for designing a robotic cell to disassemble a battery pack with the support of an operator.
This paper analyses the use of robotics for EVs’ battery pack disassembly to enable the extraction of the battery modules preserving their integrity for further reuse or recycling.
Following the recommendations given after the safety analysis, as a specific potentially explosive atmosphere (ATEX) 3 zone, the battery pack was manually disassembled. The manual disassembly brought to a disassembly procedure which was decomposed and analysed to identify how to automate the same operations with a robot.
This large growth in battery returns will also have a noticeable impact on processes such as battery disassembly. The purpose of this paper is, therefore, to examine the challenges of the battery disassembly process in relation to the required increase in the degree of automation.