Electronic Waste Separation Using Magnetic Minirobots

The research and applications of miniature robots are rapidly evolving. For robots that move with three degrees of freedom, the in-vivo appears to be the most promising application with the potential to change the paradigm in many fields of study. The applications of miniature robots that move on planar surfaces (two degrees of freedom) have not yet been clearly settled. The most promising research direction appears to be the manipulator for in-vitro applications or precise manipulation in industry. We propose to employ the system of miniature robots in electronic waste separation, which is one of the global and upcoming challenges. We developed insect-scale robots and algorithms to autonomously separate electronic components. We anticipate our work to be a proof-of-concept for more complex manipulation tasks in planar robotic systems. The system was designed in such a way that each part can be easily replaced with different hardware or software technique, which gives the ability to reuse our approach in different tasks easily.