Liam’s goal is to improve material recovery from Apple products. We explored automation and robotics because of their potential to meticulously “de-manufacture” an electronic device. By using automation, individual components can be removed from a device and separated, instead of shredding and mixing all the material together.

The biggest engineering challenge was that many of the phones Liam disassembles are beyond repair meaning they have a variety of damage. This creates a lot of variability from phone to phone, which is extremely challenging to a repeatable robotic process.

We created custom hardware and software to combat these variables. The software, 29 robotic arms, tools, and the conveyer belt that moves phones between each arm are unique to the Liam line. Each component is removed and falls into isolated bins for specialty material recycling.

The system has two ways of removing components: end-of-arm-tooling such as a drill bit, suction cup, or fixed tip interacting with a stationary iPhone, and direct robot handling of iPhone to interact with external active tooling while performing complex, coordinated movements. The tooling on the robotic arms and external tool fixtures are all custom developed for the Liam line. Liam removes the following components from the iPhone 6: coverglass assembly, battery, main logic board, receiver, speaker, alert module, rear facing camera, and housing.

There are currently two Liam systems—one in the United States and another in the Netherlands. Every 11 seconds an iPhone is disassembled into 8 discrete components, with each line capable of disassembling 1.2 million iPhone 6 units per year. The Liam system is comprised of 29 robots in 21 cells with dual-robots used in certain cells with particularly high cycle times.

Our goal is to create a closed loop of materials. For example, we took the aluminum enclosures Liam recovered from iPhone 6, melted them and reused the material to create Mac mini computers we use in our iPhone final assembly facilities.

Liam was introduced to the world at an Apple event in March of 2016. After his introduction, Siri was asked about Liam over 130,000 times. The Liam YouTube video has been viewed over 2.9 million times.