Yuko Okada*, Toshiyuki Aoki*, Masakatsu Hayashi*, Kouji Tagusari* and Takeo Takagi*

* Mechanical Engineering Research laboratory, Hitachi Ltd.

+ Correspondence should be addressed to Yuko Okada:
(502, Kandatsu, Tsuchiura, Ibaraki 300-0013 Japan)

Abstract

In the 'Primary Disassembly Process', a motor or a compressor is removed and disassembled from the cabinet of a post-use electrical home appliance by automatically cutting the part of the cabinet to which the motor or compressor is fastened. Using the automatic 'Primary Disassembly Process' it is necessary to recognize the category of electrical home appliances to which an object belongs, to know the position at which the motor or compressor is attached to the appliance, and to sort the appliance according to its category. We therefore developed a method for automatically recognizing an appliance's category, as well as a method for automatically finding the attachment position of the motor or compressor and also determining where to cut the cabinet in order to remove the motor or compressor. The former method determines an appliance's category by measuring its cabinet size by using computer vision. The latter method finds the attachment position by measuring the 'unbalance' of the appliance's mass. It took about 40 seconds to perform the automatic recognition and sorting process by using an automatic sorting machine based on these methods.

Key words: post-use electrical home appliances, disassemble, vision, mass, balance