Industry 4.0 and prospects of circular economy: a survey of robotic assembly and disassembly

Despite their contributions to the financial efficiency and environmental sustainability of industrial processes, robotic assembly and disassembly have been understudied in the existing literature. This is in contradiction to their importance in realizing the Fourth Industrial Revolution. More specifically, although most of the literature has extensively discussed how to optimally assemble or disassemble given products, the role of other factors has been overlooked. For example, and among other factors, the choices of the robots involved in implementing the sequence plans, which should ideally be taken into account throughout the whole chain consisting of design, assembly, disassembly, and reassembly, may greatly affect the underlying implications with a considerable impact on the viability and effectiveness of the measures aimed at substantiating, realizing, and strengthening the backbones of a circular economy. Isolating the foregoing operations from the rest of the components of the relevant ecosystems may lead to erroneous inferences toward both the necessity and efficiency of the underlying procedures. In this paper, we try to alleviate these shortcomings by comprehensively investigating the state of the art in robotic assembly and disassembly. We consider and review various aspects of manufacturing and remanufacturing frameworks while particularly focusing on their desirability for supporting a circular economy.