Industrial-Grade Robust Robot Vision for Screw Detection and Removal under Uneven Conditions

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.

As urban waste volumes escalate and labor shortages intensify, automated waste sorting systems are becoming a necessity. However, current robotic solutions often struggle with the 3D perception and manipulation of transparent, deformable, or cluttered objects. This work introduces ROBOCYCLE, an autonomous dual-arm robotic recycling platform designed to meet the recycling standards of the Tokyo metropolitan area. Our approach integrates multi-view RGB-D perception, transformer-based instance segmentation using RF-DETR, and 6-DoF grasp planning via the Anygrasp SDK. By processing segmentated point clouds, the system generates robust candidate poses for irregular and deformable waste. The system achieved a 90.3% grasp success rate and 84.3% overall task success rate, effectively performing complex coordinated tasks such as unscrewing PET bottle caps. The proposed platform offers a scalable solution for autonomous waste management in real-world human environments.

In robot automated assembly, snap assembly precision and efficiency directly determine overall production quality. As a core prerequisite, snap detection and localization critically affect subsequent assembly success. Traditional visual methods suffer from poor robustness and large localization errors when handling complex scenarios (e.g., transparent or low-contrast snaps), failing to meet high-precision assembly demands. To address this, this paper designs a dedicated sensor and proposes SMR-Net, an self-attention-based multi-scale object detection algorithm, to synergistically enhance detection and localization performance. SMR-Net adopts an attention-enhanced multi-scale feature fusion architecture: raw sensor data is encoded via an attention-embedded feature extractor to strengthen key snap features and suppress noise; three multi-scale feature maps are processed in parallel with standard and dilated convolution for dimension unification while preserving resolution; an adaptive reweighting network dynamically assigns weights to fused features, generating fine representations integrating details and global semantics. Experimental results on Type A and Type B snap datasets show SMR-Net outperforms traditional Faster R-CNN significantly: Intersection over Union (IoU) improves by 6.52% and 5.8%, and mean Average Precision (mAP) increases by 2.8% and 1.5% respectively. This fully demonstrates the method's superiority in complex snap detection and localization tasks.