Battery Recycling Robot: ABB Arms and EV Packs

A battery recycling robot has a job nobody designed the product for. Electric car packs are glued, bolted and wired together to survive years on the road, and a pack can still hold hundreds of volts when it reaches the recycler. This post follows the work from lead battery smelters and hand teardown benches to the shredders and black mass plants opening in 2026. It covers the research cells that took the first EV packs apart with robots, where ABB robots such as the IRB 6700 fit with vision and force control, and what still keeps most pack dismantling in human hands.

The open battery pack of a 2011 Nissan Leaf, with its modules, wiring and control unit on show. Photo: Mariordo (Mario Roberto Duran Ortiz) / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

From lead smelters to hand teardown of EV packs

Battery recycling started with lead. Car starter batteries were worth reclaiming because the lead inside could be melted and cast again. Plants grind the batteries, neutralize the acid and separate the plastic cases from the lead. Recycling rates in the United States moved with the lead price, with figures of 97 percent in 1965 and 61 percent in 1983, and today nearly 99 percent of lead acid car batteries are recycled. The work was hot and toxic, and smelter workers handled molten lead and its fumes by hand.

A worker in a respirator handles lead at a lead acid battery recovery plant. Photo: NIOSH via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Lithium ion packs from electric cars brought a different problem. A pack is a frame full of modules, cables, cooling plates, sensors and control boards, and every carmaker builds it differently. In the first years, recyclers took packs apart on benches with insulated tools, one bolt and one connector at a time. Researchers describe manual dismantling as slow, expensive and risky, because a damaged cell can go into thermal runaway and a pack can carry close to 900 volts. Many plants simply skipped the dismantling and sent whole modules to the shredder.

Lead acid battery packs fill the trunk of an experimental electric car. Photo: US National Archives via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Robots came in through research labs. In 2021 Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee showed an automated line that disassembles spent EV packs. Its team said the line could handle about 100 battery stacks in the time manual work handled 12, and that once the robot picks up the pack, no person touches it until it is in pieces. At the University of Birmingham, a Faraday Institution team used two Franka Emika Panda cobots and a haptic controller so an operator could unbolt, sort and cut a 2011 Nissan Leaf module stack from a safe distance.

The lithium ion battery pack of a BMW i3 with its lid open, showing the modules a recycler has to remove. Photo: RudolfSimon / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Black mass plants and the robots on the line in 2026

The recycling plants themselves are scaling up fast. On 11 September 2026, Sumitomo Metal Mining held a ceremony for Japan's first commercial scale battery recycling plant, split between its Toyo Plant in Saijo and the Niihama Nickel Plant in Ehime. Together they can process about 10,000 tonnes of battery cells a year and recover copper, nickel, cobalt and lithium. Most plants shred cells into black mass, a powder rich in those metals, then dissolve it with acids to pull each metal out. A week later Porsche said it had built cells whose cathode material came entirely from metals recovered by the recycler cylib from old Porsche packs.

Collected household batteries on a mechanical sorting line at Bebat in Belgium, 2023. Photo: Bebat / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Before any shredding, someone still has to discharge the pack, open the housing and pull the modules. That front end is where robots make the most sense, and it is close to what ABB robots already do in car plants. The IRB 6700 is a large six-axis arm built for 150 to 300 kg loads, enough to lift a pack lid or a full module. With ABB Integrated Vision, a camera on the cell can find bolts and connectors that move from pack to pack, and ABB's force control software lets the arm feel resistance while it unscrews, pries or lifts a stuck part.

An ABB IRB 6700 grinding a steel part in Teqram's EasyGrinder cell at Ancofer. Photo: ABB

ABB has not announced a pack dismantling line, so treat this as a possibility. Much of the hardware is already in its battery work. ABB builds robot cells for battery module assembly, including in its own plant in Baden, Switzerland, and our post on EV battery assembly covers how packs are built in the first place. Teardown is the same steps run in reverse, with far more variation. For smaller parts, the same thinking we described for e-waste disassembly applies to battery control boards and wiring.

An ABB robot cell for battery modules at ABB's plant in Baden, Switzerland. Photo: ABB

Where battery recycling robots go next

The next step is design for disassembly. If carmakers use screws instead of glue, standard connectors and labels a camera can read, a robot can take a pack apart without guessing. Several research groups now train vision models to recognize pack layouts, and simulation lets engineers try a teardown sequence before any pack arrives. A dismantling cell built from ABB arms would be planned the same way, in RobotStudio, with SafeMove zones keeping people clear while the robot works near live modules.

A cutaway Nissan Leaf shows the orange battery pack under the floor, the part a dismantling cell has to reach. Photo: Norsk Elbilforening / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Factories will see this first. Closed loop deals like Porsche with cylib, and GM with Cirba Solutions, which said in September that a pilot had powered new GM cars with recycled critical minerals, need steady streams of clean, sorted material. Robots that separate modules, cables and aluminium housings before shredding raise the value of what comes out. Cost and variety are the open problems. A plant receives packs from many models and model years, and a cell tuned for one pack may stop at the next.

An ABB IRB 6700 lifts a large panel at dhp technology, the kind of load a pack lid or module would be. Photo: ABB

Homes are part of the chain too. Old phone and laptop cells and e-bike batteries end up in collection bins, and lithium cells thrown in the household trash are a known fire risk for waste trucks and sorting plants. Collection points and sorting lines already use machines to separate battery types. Safety will decide how fast robots move from these sorting lines into pack teardown, because a crushed cell can catch fire inside a cell enclosure as easily as on a bench. Plants will also need people who can program and repair these robot cells.

A street collection bin for used household batteries in Málaga, Spain, 2022. Photo: Daniel Capilla / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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