Towards reuse and recycling of lithium-ion batteries: tele-robotics for disassembly of electric vehicle batteries

Disassembly of electric vehicle batteries is a critical stage in recovery, recycling and re-use of high-value battery materials, but is complicated by limited standardisation, design complexity, compounded by uncertainty and safety issues from varying end-of-life condition. Telerobotics presents an avenue for semi-autonomous robotic disassembly that addresses these challenges. However, it is suggested that quality and realism of the user’s haptic interactions with the environment is important for precise, contact-rich and safety-critical tasks. To investigate this proposition, we demonstrate the disassembly of a Nissan Leaf 2011 module stack as a basis for a comparative study between a traditional asymmetric haptic-“cobot” master-slave framework and identical master and slave cobots based on task completion time and success rate metrics. We demonstrate across a range of disassembly tasks a time reduction of 22%–57% is achieved using identical cobots, yet this improvement arises chiefly from an expanded workspace and 1:1 positional mapping, and suffers a 10%–30% reduction in first attempt success rate. For unbolting and grasping, the realism of force feedback was comparatively less important than directional information encoded in the interaction, however, 1:1 force mapping strengthened environmental tactile cues for vacuum pick-and-place and contact cutting tasks.