Jamming problems and the effects of compliance in dual peg-hole disassembly

Abstract

Disassembly is a crucial step in remanufacturing and is currently mainly performed by humans. Automating disassembly can reduce labour costs and make remanufacturing more economically attractive. This paper focuses on identifying and characterizing a common disassembly task, dual peg-hole disassembly, with the aim of building a robotic disassembly system for this task. We enumerate the possible contact states and their geometric conditions during the extraction of two studs in a dual peg-hole. This paper focuses on jamming in the extraction and conducts geometrical and quasi-static analyses to determine the boundary conditions of jamming. Based on the analyses, this paper also investigates the role of active compliance as a solution to avoid jamming. We also simulate critical variables and examine key parameters such as the degree of compliance, the location of the compliance centre and initial position errors. Finally, we conduct experimental studies on dual peg-hole extraction with different compliance centres obtained using active compliance.