Cable Assem­bly and Handling

Dur­ing har­ness assem­bly or cable har­ness man­u­fac­tur­ing, flex­i­ble cables must be gripped, processed and, for exam­ple, plugged into a con­nec­tor hous­ing. Robot-based automa­tion of this plug­ging process is not pos­si­ble with­out sen­sors or force con­trol and is very com­plex and usu­ally not robust with con­ven­tional pro­gram­ming. If the cables or wires hang freely in the room, even grip­ping the parts in the first step is a major challenge.

The robotic approach devel­oped by ArtiMinds for this com­plex cable han­dling appli­ca­tion is based on a unique com­bi­na­tion of laser line scan­ners, 2D cam­era tech­nol­ogy and force-torque mea­sure­ment, as well as inter­faces and intel­li­gent func­tion blocks in the ArtiMinds Robot Pro­gram­ming Suite (RPS), which were newly devel­oped for this purpose.
The soft­ware processes the scan result in real time and syn­chro­nizes it with the robot motion to deter­mine the exact pickup point. It then per­forms a force-con­trolled join­ing oper­a­tion that enables pre­cise and safe inser­tion of the cables into the con­nec­tor hous­ing. Dur­ing the final pull test, the robot checks whether the cable end is cor­rectly engaged in the housing.