Task planner for robotic disassembly of electric vehicle battery pack

Abstract

The rapidly growing deployment of Electric Vehicles (EV) put strong demands on the development of Lithium-Ion Batteries (LIBs) but also into its dismantling process, a necessary step for circular economy. The aim of this study is therefore to develop an autonomous task planner for the dismantling of EV Lithium-Ion Battery pack to a module level through the design and implementation of a computer vision system. This research contributes to moving closer towards fully automated EV battery robotic dismantling, an inevitable step for a sustainable world transition to an electric economy. For the proposed task planner the main functions consist in identifying LIB components and their locations, in creating a feasible dismantling plan, and lastly in moving the robot to the detected dismantling positions. Results show that the proposed method has measurement errors lower than 5 mm. In addition, the system is able to perform all the steps in the order and with a total average time of 34 s. The computer vision, robotics and battery disassembly have been successfully unified, resulting in a designed and tested task planner well suited for product with large variations and uncertainties.