This paper provides details on a case study conducted into the upcycling of e-waste. E-waste is a global problem that is becoming an increasing burden on low-to-middle income countries. These low-to-middle income countries are the recipients of large volumes of e-waste per annum from higher income countries. In certain countries, precious metals are extracted from e-waste, however, this only marginally reduces the stockpiles of waste material, rendering much of it unusable. The objectives of this paper are to highlight the feasibility of reengineering and upcycling e-waste as a workable route to waste management, using robotics as an example application area. Our methods included sourcing e-waste, identifying and isolating different usable parts from the waste, and re-engineering these into a flexible end effector with complete, coupled, rotational and translational freedom. We further develop active alternative control systems with passive elastic recovery. Our work shows there is feasibility in re-engineering e-waste to manufacture functional electro-mechanical products and devices, and that upcycling e-waste in this way is a step towards responsible e-waste management through engineering knowledge and practice. Our work also highlights some of the impracticalities and challenges involved in e-waste upcycling.

This article declares a correction to the article 'Design of a Hall effect sensor controlled brittle star inspired composite robotic limb' published in Eng. Res. Express 4 036001

This paper elucidates a method of actuation and feedback for hard-soft composite continuum pentapod appendages to enable both kinematic accuracy and gait. A feedback mechanism based on Hall effect sensors is integrated within a hard exterior/soft interior composite robotic limb, which is unaffected by actuator slippage, and provides accurate (sub $2^\circ$) end point measurements. The proposed method for actuation uses two actuators to control a full semi-spherical range of motion, an improvement to the use of three actuators more commonly reported in the literature. When applied to enable the gait of a complete brittle star inspired pentapod, we find that our design reaches a momentum of 0.52$kg \cdot m/s$, surpassing the momentum of previously reported untethered starfish inspired pentapods by 3.7 times.