Good news! This seems to be still early, preliminary work!
The famous Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter coined the term "creative destruction" of free markets! The coming and going of new businesses!
The Achilles heel of this system seems to be the requirement to work off CAD data of the broken robot. What if the CAD data is e.g. not available?
"... There are over 4 million industrial robots in use worldwide, according to the International Federation of Robotics. And researchers predict that number will grow to over 16 million by 2030, as manufacturing rapidly increases. But what’s going to happen when they start breaking down?
A new system designed by researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), in Karlsruhe, Germany, can predict the defect in a broken product and disassemble it while protecting valuable parts from damage. To continue robotic development sustainably, the industry should prepare for the dismantling, recycling, and rebuilding of our robotic systems. ...
KIT’s robotic disassembly system relies on a CAD model of the broken product and of each part, so it can see how the parts should behave and understand if anything is out of the ordinary. It also uses a mathematical model to predict the damage done to a broken part.
When you give the system a broken device and a CAD model, it first guesses how each part of the broken device should move. The axes each part can move along are called degrees of freedom (for example, a screw should rotate, but not move side to side). The disassembler nudges each part to see if it moves as expected. Based on how the part actually moves, it then uses the mathematical model to predict what went wrong with the part: A corroded part might move less than you think it should, a loose screw may move more, and a deformed part might have different degrees of freedom than expected.
At the beginning of disassembly, the system formulates a plan. It guesses what might be wrong with the device it’s taking apart, and then can change its guess based on observing each piece it takes apart. ..."
From the abstract:
"To support the circular economy, robotic systems must not only assemble new products but also disassemble end-of-life (EOL) ones for reuse, recycling, or safe disposal.
Existing approaches to disassembly sequence planning often assume deterministic and fully observable product models, yet real EOL products frequently deviate from their initial designs due to wear, corrosion, or undocumented repairs.
We argue that disassembly should therefore be formulated as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP), which naturally captures uncertainty about the product's internal state. We present a mathematical formulation of disassembly as a POMDP, in which hidden variables represent uncertain structural or physical properties.
Building on this formulation, we propose a task and motion planning framework that automatically derives specific POMDP models from CAD data, robot capabilities, and inspection results.
To obtain tractable policies, we approximate this formulation with a reinforcement-learning approach that operates on stochastic action outcomes informed by inspection priors, while a Bayesian filter continuously maintains beliefs over latent EOL conditions during execution.
Using three products on two robotic systems, we demonstrate that this probabilistic planning framework outperforms deterministic baselines in terms of average disassembly time and variance, generalizes across different robot setups, and successfully adapts to deviations from the CAD model, such as missing or stuck parts."
From CAD to POMDP: Probabilistic Planning for Robotic Disassembly of End-of-Life Products (preprint, open access)
