cs.ROMar 19, 2026

Robotic Agentic Platform for Intelligent Electric Vehicle Disassembly

Authors: Zachary Allen, Max Conway, Lyle Antieau, Allen Ponraj, Nikolaus Correll

Organizations: Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado, Boulder

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Abstract

Electric vehicles (EV) create an urgent need for scalable battery recycling, yet disassembly of EV battery packs remains largely manual due to high design variability. We present our Robotic Agentic Platform for Intelligent Disassembly (RAPID), designed to investigate perception-driven manipulation, flexible automation, and AI-assisted robot programming in realistic recycling scenarios. The system integrates a gantry-mounted industrial manipulator, RGB-D perception, and an automated nut-running tool for fastener removal on a full-scale EV battery pack. An open-vocabulary object detection pipeline achieves 0.9757 mAP50, enabling reliable identification of screws, nuts, busbars, and other components. We experimentally evaluate (n=204) three one-shot fastener removal strategies: taught-in poses (97% success rate, 24 min duration), one-shot vision execution (57%, 29 min), and visual servoing (83%, 36 min), comparing success rate and disassembly time for the battery's top cover fasteners. To support flexible interaction, we introduce agentic AI specifications for robotic disassembly tasks, allowing LLM agents to translate high-level instructions into robot actions through structured tool interfaces and ROS services. We evaluate SmolAgents with GPT-4o-mini and Qwen 3.5 9B/4B on edge hardware. Tool-based interfaces achieve 100% task completion, while automatic ROS service discovery shows 43.3% failure rates, highlighting the need for structured robot APIs for reliable LLM-driven control. This open-source platform enables systematic investigation of human-robot collaboration, agentic robot programming, and increasingly autonomous disassembly workflows, providing a practical foundation for research toward scalable robotic battery recycling.

Figures & tables

Fig. 1 : Hyundai Ioniq5 EV battery being dismantled by the RAPID system
Fig. 2 : Integration of conventional automation systems, open-world vision systems, motion planning and Agentic AI.
TaskDescriptionTime (s)WorkersMan-secondsTools
1Remove 8 large screws on top cover1202240Large nutrunner
2Remove 70 screws and nuts holding top cover50121002Nutrunner (high torque)
3Remove cover plate27254None
4Remove two busbars to break battery voltage into two1002200Nutrunner (high torque)
5Remove two large cables connecting across battery1732346Nutrunner (high torque)
6Remove 6+1 large busbars1902380Nutrunner (high torque)
TABLE I : Battery Disassembly Task Breakdown
Fig. 3 : Left: Custom end-effector for the UR16e that holds a nut-runner and a Intel RealSense D435 in place. The nut-runner has been retrofitted with an Arduino-based interface board to control speed and measure current via Ethernet. Right: Block diagram of the Ethernet-based nutrunner control system.
Fig. 4 : Industrial workflow for setup (orange) and execution (green). Left: Relevant battery parts are labeled with text (1) and trained (2). All part locations and disassembly sequence are stored in JSON description (3) and right. Middle: Execution starts with a full scan, registration of parts (A), and uses agentic AI to execute the plan together with a human co-worker (B). Right: Sample JSON data structure.
IK MethodCandidatesSR (%) ↑\uparrowAvg. Plan Time (s) ↓\downarrow
KDL, 1 seed125.71.47
KDL, 50 random seeds≤\leq 5073.010.46
Analytical (ours)≤\leq 16899.30.31
TABLE II : IK solver comparison over 1 000 random goal poses with a 20 s planning budget.
 YoloWorldX [ 18 ]Yolov11L [ 25 ]
mAP0.50.97570.9708
mAP50-950.76250.7336
Precision0.92060.9359
Recall0.96730.9244
TABLE III : Object recognition performance of an LLM-ready open-world ready model (left) vs. class-based vision system (right).
Fig. 5 : Confusion matrix for YoloWorld on test set containing 18 Bolts, 27 BusBars, 85 InteriorScrews, 40 Nuts, 48 Orange Covers, 69 Screw, and 71 Screw Holes
 Taught-in Poses1-shot visionVisual Servo
Avg Time (min)24.0928.7036.29
Success rate97.06%57.35%82.84%
TABLE IV : Success rate for different removal strategies (n=204).
Fig. 6 : Metrics across three LLM back-ends for agentic execution of simple robot-motion commands “Move the robot 0.2m forward/backward” via MCP (orange) and an explicit SmolAgents tool (blue). Boxes: Q1/median/Q3; whiskers: 1.5 IQR; circles: outliers; dots: individual trials ( n=20n=20 ).
Fig. 7 : Metrics across three LLM back-ends for agentic execution of the complex screw-removal task (identify 5 of 68 remaining parts from the database, remove them, and update status) via MCP (orange) and an explicit SmolAgents tool (blue). Boxes: Q1/median/Q3; whiskers: 1.5 IQR; circles: outliers; dots: individual trials ( n=10n=10 per approach). Although performance looks similar, MCP has a 43.3% failure rate vs. 0% for the tool-based approach.
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