Generalized Partially Destructive Disassembly Planning for Robotic Disassembly

While robotic assembly is a well researched topic, recycling and disassembly of products are also becoming ever more important as we transition to a more sustainable economy. In disassembly, we are typically only interested in a subset of product parts, which opens the possibility of using destructive processes such as tearing, cutting, or milling to speed up the disassembly. Currently, such destructive actions are only included as predefined case-specific actions such as milling away a screw head. By contrast, this paper presents a generalized approach to destructive disassembly planning that can automatically derive destructive disassembly actions from a symbolic representation of the disassembly state. Viable destructive actions are identified and verified only based on the underlying geometric model, circumventing the need for their explicit definition. We showcase the performance of this system both virtually on several test parts and physically by destructively and non-destructively disassembling a model of an electric motor using a robot manipulator with a multitool end effector.