The coordinator of ReconCycle Aleš Ude attended BrIAS Forum on Sustainable Robotic Technologies, held on March 29th, 2024, at VUB in Brussels, Belgium. The aim of the forum was to discuss sustainable robotics technologies ranging from material science, material processing and metal, electronics with sensors and processing, actuators, energy, power and batteries control, and artificial intelligence. Aleš Ude presented the results of ReconCycle in a talk titled Adaptive robotics for the recycling of electronic devices.
The Jožef Stefan Institute Open House is intended for the general public, when JSI welcomes all who are interested in basic and applied research conducted at the institute. The Open House 2024 took place on March 23rd. The ReconCycle workcell for the dismantling of electronic devices was among the exhibits presented to the public. Several hundred visitors came to see the cell and receive further information about the importance of robotics for the recycling of electronic devices.
In the frame of European Robotics Forum in Rimini, Italy, ReconCycle in cooperation with the Imagine project organised a workshop titled Adaptive Robotics for Recycling of Electronic Devices. The workshop included three speakers from ReconCycle, Manuel Catalano (IIT), Mihael Simonič (JSI), and Sebastian Ruiz (University of Göttingen).
Our speakers discussed the technological challenges of automated recycling of electronic devices and how to address them with soft robotics, robot learning, and computer vision technologies. A panel discussion that included experts such as Hannes Fröhlich (Electrocycling) and Tamim Asfour (KIT) was held at the end of the workshop.
ReconCycle countinues to present our results at events across Europe. In March qbrobotics exhibited their work at European Robotics Forum in Rimini, Italy. They showed the grasping and manipulation versatility of qb SoftHand and the Variable Stiffness Gripper for many applications like the electronic waste recycling.
The results of the project, regarding the automatic disassembly of smoke detectors, were presented at the trade fair for automation, mechatronics, sensor technology, and measurement technologies (IFAM 2024) in Ljubljana, Slovenia from February 13th–15th 2024.
ReconCycle was a technical sponsor of the Robothon competition organized by Technical University of Munich. Inspired by this project, Robothon brings together roboticists from around the world to create robotic manipulation skills for autonomous handling of electronic waste. The teams were given four weeks to solve a specially designed task board, which includes operations typical for electronic waste recycling. It is worth to mention that prof. Ude (the lead of the ReconCycle project consortium) was part of jury committee in 2023.
The award ceremony was held on June 29th, 2023, at the automatica trade fair in Munich, Germany. Congratulations to the winner, team RoboPig from Technical University of Applied Sciences, Würzburg-Schweinfurt, Germany.
Adaptive Intelligent Robots with Soft Hands: Methods and Experiments
The goal of this summer school is to transfer advanced robotics and computer vision knowledge to graduate students and younger postdocs with a focus on modern adaptive methods. These methods will be from AI (network learning), but also from different fields of robotics including adaptive control as well as the introduction of modern, highly adaptive robotic hands to teach participants about the mechanical as well as control- and cognitive-related power of adaptation in computer vision and robotics.
As target application two talks from expert from the recycling industry will be incorporated into this school, which is a field where adaptive methods are highly needed for advanced “green” automation.
The format of this school will be lectures by experts and discussion as well as experimental work, where one day during this school students will perform experiments on a set of computer vision as well as robotics platforms. We also include a poster session and 11 student talks, selected on the grounds of their abstract (to be submitted on registration), where students can present their work, too.
Join us for ReconCycle Summer School 2023 in Mallorca, October 23-26!
On June 2nd, 2023, the president of Slovenia, Nataša Pirc Musar, paid a visit to JSI. The director of the institute, along with his colleagues, provided her with an overview of the institute’s organization and activities, as well as current events both within the institute and in the broader scientific community. They talked about developments in the field of robotics, artificial intelligence, physics, biochemistry and environmental sciences. The president also visited the Department of Automatics, Biocybernetics, and Robotics, where we had the opportunity to showcase the ReconCycle project and the ReconCycle workcell in more detail. During the visit, we provided a demonstration of a simplified disassembly use case, illustrating the innovative technologies and processes employed in the project.
ICRA 2023 was held from May 29th – June 2nd in the International Convention Centre (ICC) of ExCeL, London, UK. In the conference exhibition area, qbrobotics showed the grasping and manipulation versatility of qb SoftHand 2 Reserch and the integration of sensing capabilities on the Variable Stiffness Gripper. Both devices were in part developed in ReconCycle project.
The ReconCycle partner, qbrobotics, has developed an application that allows one qb SoftClaw and one qb SoftHand2 Research to work together in disassembling certain electronic components.
Industrial development of this application will be presented in booth F45, Hall 30 at MECSPE 2023, the international reference fair for the Manufacturing industry, which will be held March 29-31, 2023 at BolognaFiere in Bologna, Italy.
No sensors or vision systems were required to perform this task, only the mechanical intelligence of the device.
