Collaborative robots in e-waste management

Nowadays manufacturing companies are going through an increasing public and government pressure to reduce the environmental impact of their operations. But when dealing with e-waste, some difficulties arise in classifying and dismantling electronic devices. Manual operations are financially prohibitive and full automation is also discarded due to the lack of uniformity of the disposed devices. A halfway solution is to let a human operator and a robot share the process. The goal of this research is the optimization of the recycling process of electronic equipments, applying both technical and economic criteria, and taking into account the latest developments in collaborative robots. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.