  Despite their contributions to the financial efficiency and environmental
sustainability of industrial processes, robotic assembly and disassembly have
been understudied in the existing literature. This is in contradiction to their
importance in realizing the Fourth Industrial Revolution. More specifically,
although most of the literature has extensively discussed how to optimally
assemble or disassemble given products, the role of other factors has been
overlooked. For example, the types of robots involved in implementing the
sequence plans, which should ideally be taken into account throughout the whole
chain consisting of design, assembly, disassembly and reassembly. Isolating the
foregoing operations from the rest of the components of the relevant ecosystems
may lead to erroneous inferences toward both the necessity and efficiency of
the underlying procedures. In this paper we try to alleviate these shortcomings
by comprehensively investigating the state-of-the-art in robotic assembly and
disassembly. We consider and review various aspects of manufacturing and
remanufacturing frameworks while particularly focusing on their desirability
for supporting a circular economy.
