An active object recognition system for disassembly tasks

Recycling of used products is of increasing importance in a society that becomes aware of its responsibility for the environment. Thus, the automatic disassembly in recycling processes will be of increasing importance within the next decade. In this paper, we motivate the use of vision-based control of robot manipulators in an autonomous disassembly station. For this purpose, we present an active object recognition and measurement system based on a stereo head with four mechanical and six optical degrees of freedom. The system has been successfully tested for the task of automatically unbolting wheels from unknown used cars