This robotic disassembling system is capable of unscrewing, manipulating, and milling through defective devices while preserving valuable parts from damage.
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 moreindustrial robotswill be needed.
There areover 4 millionindustrial robots in use worldwide, according to theInternational Federation of Robotics. Andresearchers predictthat 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 theKarlsruhe Institute of Technology(KIT), in Karlsruhe,Germany, can predict the defect in a broken product and disassemble it whil…
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 …
Building a product with new parts is easy, saysJan 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 u…
KIT’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 usesa 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 …
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 screwshouldmove, and take th…
Baumgärtner’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 anindustrial robot factory that creates cars,but instead is specialized to take them apart. Or, as he puts it, “as a …
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] th…
This researchwas 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.
Kohava Mendelsohnis the IEEE Spectrum’s Community Manager. She has a bachelors degree in engineering science with a major in robotics from the University of Toronto and a masters in science journalism from New York University.
Baumgärtner envisions scaling up this one system, composed of a few robotic arms, to have many robotic disassembler arms, each with different tools. That is my favorite line.