An Augmented Reality-Assisted Disassembly Approach for End-of-Life Vehicle Power Batteries

The rapid expansion of the global electric vehicle industry has presented significant challenges in the management of end-of-life power batteries. Retired power batteries contain valuable resources, such as lithium, cobalt, nickel, and other metals, which can be recycled and reused in various applications. The existing disassembly processes rely on manual operations that are time-consuming, labour-intensive, and prone to errors. This research proposes an intelligent augmented reality (AR)-assisted disassembly approach that aims to increase disassembly efficiency by providing scene awareness and visual guidance to operators in real-time. The approach starts by employing a deep learning-based instance segmentation method to process the Red-Green-Blue-Dept (RGB-D) data of the disassembly scene. The segmentation method segments the disassembly object instances and reconstructs their point cloud representation, given the corresponding depth information obtained from the instance masks. In addition, to estimate the pose of the disassembly target in the scene and assess their disassembly status, an iterative closed point algorithm is used to align the segmented point cloud instances with the actual disassembly objects. The acquired information is then utilised for the generation of AR instructions, decreasing the need for frequent user interaction during the disassembly processes. To verify the feasibility of the AR-assisted disassembly system, experiments were conducted on end-of-life vehicle power batteries. The results demonstrated that this approach significantly enhanced disassembly efficiency and decreased the frequency of disassembly errors. Consequently, the findings indicate that the proposed approach is effective and holds promise for large-scale industrial recycling and disassembly operations.