Robot Recycler Salvages Parts From Broken Machines
Objects constructed by robots are ubiquitous. If you’ve used a car, household appliance, or smartphone today, you’ve used an object constructed at least in part by robots. The more products that manufacturers want to produce (and consumers want to consume) at lower costs, the more industrial robots will be needed.There are over 4 million industrial robots in use worldwide, according to the International Federation of Robotics. And researchers predict that number will grow to over 16 million by 2030, as manufacturing rapidly increases. But what’s going to happen when they start breaking down? A new system designed by researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), in Karlsruhe, Germany, can predict the defect in a broken product and disassemble it while protecting valuable parts from damage. To continue robotic development sustainably, the industry should prepare for the dismantling, recycling, and rebuilding of our robotic systems.The system consists of a predictive algorithm that guesses how a product is broken, along with robotic manipulators that actually take the broken product apart. At every stage of the process, the system checks to see if the results align with its predictions, and updates its methods if necessary. For example, in the video below, the system begins by unscrewing a broken component. To simulate a stuck screw, the researcher replaces the screw. When the system observes the screw still in place, it switches to milling away material to remove the part. Building a product with new parts is easy, says Jan Baumgärtner, one of the designers of the system. Each step is clearly outlined, and there are no expected deviations. But taking apart something that’s broken is unpredictable. “We can imagine 100 ways that something can go wrong.” And if you start taking something apart without knowing how it broke, you might have to undo part of your work when you find the problem. For example, if you have to unscrew 100 screws holding two parts together, but the last screw is stuck, you’ll have wasted time unscrewing all those screws when you should have used a different method to remove the part in the first place.How to Take Apart a ProductKIT’s robotic disassembly system relies on a CAD model of the broken product and of each part, so it can see how the parts should behave and understand if anything is out of the ordinary. It also uses a mathematical model to predict the damage done to a broken part.When you give the system a broken device and a CAD model, it first guesses how each part of the broken device should move. The axes each part can move along are called degrees of freedom (for example, a screw should rotate, but not move side to side). The disassembler nudges each part to see if it moves as expected. Based on how the part actually moves, it then uses the mathematical model to predict what went wrong with the part: A corroded part might move less than you think it should, a loose screw may move more, and a deformed part might have different degrees of freedom than expected.At the beginning of disassembly, the system formulates a plan. It guesses what might be wrong with the device it’s taking apart, and then can change its guess based on observing each piece it takes apart. For example, if there was a screw loose in the part, that might be hard to guess from an initial photograph of the broken part. But when the system moves the screw, it will notice that it can move in more ways than a screw should move, and take that loose screw into account when deconstructing the device. You can also tell the disassembly system which parts are most important to salvage intact from a broken device, and it can adjust its strategy to preserve those specific parts.The Automated Circular EconomyBaumgärtner’s motivation behind the design of the robotic disassembler is to help create a circular economy, where old devices are repaired instead of thrown away, reducing waste. “The big future is saving our planet,” he says.Baumgärtner envisions scaling up this one system, composed of a few robotic arms, to have many robotic disassembler arms, each with different tools. These arms will specialize in a different part of the disassembly process so that an entire factory could use different robotic limbs to disassemble a wide range of products. Think of an industrial robot factory that creates cars, but instead is specialized to take them apart. Or, as he puts it, “as a giant robot with 100 arms.”Ultimately, if this system works as intended, it would be a fully automated way of extracting a broken part from a system, replacing it, and rebuilding the device. Then the circular economy would really shine, as people replaced broken parts in old devices instead of buying new ones all the time. “That’s why we need to think about scaling this,” he says. “Because it means it becomes so cheap that it’s cheaper to repair this [electronic device] than to produce it. That’s the goal.”This research was presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2026 in Vienna.This story was updated 11 August 2026 to clarify that the disassembly system works for products in general, not only robots.]]>
