Safety-driven Electronic Components disassembly through Human-Robot Collaboration framework

Recent trends of industry brought to the attention of the scientific and practitioners’ communities the need for providing efficient strategies to manage the End of Life of products. This propensity gained increased importance after the global semiconductor shortage, when the acquired value of Electronic Components (ECs) made their recovery profitable. The most used disassembly techniques, however, dismantle ECs for recycling purposes, usually leaving them unserviceable. To overcome this issue, human intervention appears to be a promising option, but to make this approach productive in an industrial scale, the human operator is supposed to be assisted by robotic equipment. This frames the disassembly operation into a Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) scenario, which requires additional considerations in terms of safety and interactions. This work, hence, leverages on a framework for HRC in order to design a disassembly operation for effectively retrieving ECs from circuit boards. Additional safety measures leveraging on a computer vision-based computation of the proximity between operator’s hands and robot’s end effector are also developed and embodied in the scenario. The adoption of this setup resulted in a satisfactory safety assurance reaction time, narrowing the safety-related gap regarding the employing of HRC in semi-automated ECs’ disassembly.