  Disassembly of electric vehicle batteries is a critical stage in recovery,
recycling and re-use of high-value battery materials, but is complicated by
limited standardisation, design complexity, compounded by uncertainty and
safety issues from varying end-of-life condition. Telerobotics presents an
avenue for semi-autonomous robotic disassembly that addresses these challenges.
However, it is suggested that quality and realism of the user's haptic
interactions with the environment is important for precise, contact-rich and
safety-critical tasks. To investigate this proposition, we demonstrate the
disassembly of a Nissan Leaf 2011 module stack as a basis for a comparative
study between a traditional asymmetric haptic-'cobot' master-slave framework
and identical master and slave cobots based on task completion time and success
rate metrics. We demonstrate across a range of disassembly tasks a time
reduction of 22%-57% is achieved using identical cobots, yet this improvement
arises chiefly from an expanded workspace and 1:1 positional mapping, and
suffers a 10-30% reduction in first attempt success rate. For unbolting and
grasping, the realism of force feedback was comparatively less important than
directional information encoded in the interaction, however, 1:1 force mapping
strengthened environmental tactile cues for vacuum pick-and-place and contact
cutting tasks.
