Abstract:

This thesis presents the application of robotics for the disassembly of electric vehicle lithium-ion battery (LIB) packs for recycling. Electric vehicle battery systems can be expensive and dangerous to disassemble, therefore making it cost inefficient to recycle them currently. Dangers associated with high voltage and thermal runaway make a robotic system ideal for this task, as the danger to technicians or workers is significantly reduced, and the cost to operate a robotic system would be less expensive over the robot’s lifetime. The proposed method allows for the automated or semi-automated disassembly of electric vehicle LIB packs for recycling. In order to do this, technicians, who were involved in manually disassembling LIB packs, were studied during the disassembly process, and the modes and operations were recorded. Various modes of interacting with the battery module were chosen and broken down into gripping and cutting operations. Custom end of arm tooling was designed and prototyped for the robot, with the tooling having an input/output link to the robot. Offline simulation was performed in both MATLAB/Simulink and ROBOGUIDE in order to determine the appropriate tool paths and workspace layout for a mock battery module. The input/output communication for the end effector control was also set up using ROBOGUIDE. For the gripper, a control sequence utilizing a detection mode and a linear quadratic regulator (LQR) mode was implemented in order to ensure that the clamping force would not damage the battery cells, as this could cause a thermal event.