Solutions for robotic disassembly sequence planning with backup actions

Uncertainties in the end-of-life conditions of products make disassembly difficult to robotise. A key problem is that existing industrial automation techniques use pre-determined robotic processes which cannot deal with unforeseen failed disassembly operations. This chapter models the completion rate of a disassembly plan and introduces the concept of backup actions. The aim of this strategy is to allow a disassembly robot to recover from failures automatically, and thus improve the system’s robustness. Experimental results indicate that the incorporation of automatic backup actions can triple the completion rate of a plan. The proposed computational method also outperforms other popular evolutionary approaches.