Disassembly is an integral part of maintenance, upgrade, and remanufacturing operations to recover end-of-use products. Optimization of disassembly sequences and the capability of robotic technology are crucial for managing the resource-intensive nature of dismantling operations. This study proposes an optimization framework for disassembly sequence planning under uncertainty considering human-robot collaboration. The proposed model combines three attributes: disassembly cost, disassembleability, and safety, to find the optimal path for dismantling a product and assigning each disassembly operation among humans and robots. The multi-attribute utility function has been employed to address uncertainty and make a tradeoff among multiple attributes. The disassembly time reflects the cost of disassembly and is assumed to be an uncertain parameter with a Beta probability density function; the disassembleability evaluates the feasibility of conducting operations by robot; finally, the safety index ensures the safety of human workers in the work environment. The optimization model identifies the best disassembly sequence and makes tradeoffs among multi-attributes. An example of a computer desktop illustrates how the proposed model works. The model identifies the optimal disassembly sequence with less disassembly cost, high disassembleability, and increased safety index while allocating disassembly operations between human and robot. A sensitivity analysis is conducted to show themore »
A Robotic System Method and Rebar Construction with Off-the-Shelf Robots
The construction industry has traditionally been a labor-intensive industry. Typically, labor cost takes a significant portion of the total project cost. In spite of the good pay, there was a big gap recently between demand and supply in construction trades position. A survey shows that more than 80% of construction companies in the Midwest of US are facing workforce shortage and suffering in finding enough skilled trades people to hire. This workforce shortage is also nationwide or even worldwide in many places. Construction automation provides a potential solution to mitigate this problem by seeking to replace some of the demanding, repetitive, and/or dangerous construction operations with robotic automation. Currently, robots have been used in bricklaying or heavy-lifting operations in the industry, and other uses remain to be explored. In this paper, the authors proposed a feasibility breakdown structure (FBS)-based robotic system method that can be used to test the feasibility of performing target construction operations with specific robotic systems, including a top-down work breakdown structure and a bottom-up set of feasibility analysis components based on literature search and/or simulation. The proposed method was demonstrated in testing the use of a KUKA robot and a Fetch robot to perform rebar mesh more »
- Editors:
- Issa, R.
- Award ID(s):
- 1827733
- Publication Date:
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10346904
- Journal Name:
- ASCE International Conference on Computing in Civil Engineering 2021
- Page Range or eLocation-ID:
- 1204 to 1211
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Publisher's Version of Record
- https://doi.org/10.1061/9780784483893.147
