Cable Assem­bly and Handling

Flat rib­bon cables are used for sig­nal trans­mis­sion in mod­ules in elec­tron­ics man­u­fac­tur­ing as they save space, time and thus money. How­ever, han­dling the dimen­sion­ally unsta­ble and sen­si­tive cables is dif­fi­cult due to their low stiff­ness and requires a great deal of dex­ter­ity. By means of force-torque con­trol, new areas of appli­ca­tion can be opened up for indus­trial robots that can­not be imple­mented with real­is­tic effort using con­ven­tional programming.
The “Spike Search” func­tion tem­plate of ArtiMinds RPS auto­mat­i­cally com­pen­sates for tol­er­ances dur­ing the inser­tion process. That is, in order to find the cor­rect inser­tion posi­tion, the robot per­forms a force-con­trolled search move­ment and attempts to insert the cable into the socket. As soon as a defined inser­tion depth is reg­is­tered by the force-torque sen­sor, the robot knows that it has found the socket and robustly inserts the flex­i­ble com­po­nent at this posi­tion. A ten­sile test then ensures that the cable is cor­rectly seated.