Disassembly plays a key role in a life-cycle-based economy since it enables the recovery of resources in product and material cycles. In order to set up future disassembly plants, various problems have to be solved in advance. This includes varying quantities as well as a wide range of product types and states. A partly automated disassembly system could adapt to a large variety of products and different degrees of devaluation. Differences between a given disassembly plan and the actual situation at the shop floor require a highly flexible control system. High flexibility can be achieved by rapid rearrangement of transport processes and disassembly operations based on the actual system conditions in relation to requested disassembly tasks. This requires an adaptive control based on modules. Additionally, the ability to exchange control modules, variables, and parameters online will be required. Consequently, at the device level, robots have to be adaptive to new requirements in cooperation with the cell controller. Modularized program blocks and online exchanges are also required for the robot controller.

This paper presents a cost-effective solution - screwnail indentation for disassembly. It is shown that the screwnail indentation can overcome the geometry uncertainties of used products. A disassembly tool, using the screwnail as the end effector, is introduced. The disassembly task is decomposed into screwnail indentation process, task execution process, and separating process. Based on a kinematically admissible velocity field, an upper-bound analysis is performed for the screwnail indentation process and validated with an experimental set-up. The results can be applied to flexible disassembly.

Formulates the force distribution for soft multi-fingered hands as choosing a suitable internal force such that the total contact force satisfies the frictional constraints. As a first step, the direction of the optimal internal force is defined based on the grasp locations. Implementation of the algorithm is divided into two phases: (1) determine the direction of the internal force during grasp planning; (2) determine the magnitude of the internal force during task manipulation. The total computation cost consists of off-line numerical iterations and online analytical computations. Only the latter is related to the real-time control. An example shows that the proposed algorithm can efficiently deal with the soft frictional constraints and well overcome the temporal discontinuity.

The difference between the sum of squared deviations and the maximum deviation was studied. The popular least square method refers to the former, but the criterion of many engineering geometrical problems, including fitting problems, often refers to the latter. As a typical case study this paper presents a new approach to the optimization of the automobile panel fitting aiming at minimizing the maximum deviation, based on a systematic analysis of the differential adjusting motion's impact on the variations of gaps/flushes. Comparative calculations show: the conventional least square method may lead to a result with the maximum deviation over thirty percent higher than the actual optimal solution, obtained by the new method. Moreover, the latter can cope with different tolerances of different seams explicitly.