Industrial-Grade Robust Robot Vision for Screw Detection and Removal under Uneven Conditions
This addresses the need for automation in recycling plants to handle increasing used appliances with a decreasing labor force, though it is incremental as it builds on existing detection and calibration methods for a specific industrial task.
The study tackled the problem of automating disassembly of air conditioner outdoor units under uneven conditions like dirt and rust, achieving a screw detection recall of 99.8%, manipulation accuracy of +/-0.75 mm, and a disassembly success rate of 78.3% in real-world tests.
As the amount of used home appliances is expected to increase despite the decreasing labor force in Japan, there is a need to automate disassembling processes at recycling plants. The automation of disassembling air conditioner outdoor units, however, remains a challenge due to unit size variations and exposure to dirt and rust. To address these challenges, this study proposes an automated system that integrates a task-specific two-stage detection method and a lattice-based local calibration strategy. This approach achieved a screw detection recall of 99.8% despite severe degradation and ensured a manipulation accuracy of +/-0.75 mm without pre-programmed coordinates. In real-world validation with 120 units, the system attained a disassembly success rate of 78.3% and an average cycle time of 193 seconds, confirming its feasibility for industrial application.