State of the art of automatic disassembly of WEEE and perspective towards intelligent recycling in the era of Industry 4.0

Disassembly of e-waste has received significant attention over the past decades to extract value-added parts or components for recovery or reuse. It is imperative to develop automatic disassembly to replace human workers thus safeguarding them against the hazardous environment. Most scholars investigate the disassembly of e-waste from a technical perspective on laboratory scale. Few types of research related to its development track and scaled application are completed. This paper attempts to fill this gap by analyzing the disassembly of Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) in a strategic perspective from manual operation, (semi)-automation to intelligent disassembly through a systematic literature review. The main barriers to automating the recycling industry lie in the high complexity and uncertainty of end-of-life (EOL) products that perplex the automatic handling and planning. Intelligent systems integrated in cognitive robots are helpful to handle the uncertainty through learning and revision processes. This work has three objectives: first, to map out what research has been carried out in the field of WEEE disassembly and the necessity for disassembly automation; second, to conduct a systematic literature review for the state of the art of automatic disassembly and discuss the barriers to its industrial application; third, to propose a perspective for integrating Industry 4.0 technologies with disassembly automation to promote flexibility and efficiency, providing a new scheme for future treatment of WEEE.