Towards Recycling E-Waste Using Vision and Robotic Manipulation
Published in Australasian Conference on Robotics and Automation, ACRA, 2023
The increasing amount of e waste has become a major problem for society as the percentage of recycling or reuse is still insufficient. The need to find an economically viable solution to this problem is immense. One promising approach is the automatic disassembly of e-waste using robots. In this paper lessons learned from three years of participation in the Robothon Grand Challenge, an international competition to find reusable robotic capabilities for e waste disassembly, are presented. As winners of the competition in 2023 and 2021 we present our system architecture and describe the methodologies used to address the major challenges. We also demonstrate the transferability of our approach to a real world e-waste problem. The evaluation focuses on the 2023 competition tasks. Experimental results are presented for task board localisation, accuracy, execution time and robustness. For execution time a comparison of the automated solution with human performance is presented. A supplementary video can be found here.