Analysis of the mating process of plug-in cable connectors for the cable harness assembly task

In this paper, we analyze the mating process of plug-in cable connectors for wiring harness assembly tasks by showing the challenging difficulties around this task including the possible solutions: a new gripper design concept and analyzing the permissible error range (tolerance) between the connectors. For wiring harness assembly tasks, knowing the accurate pose of the grasped cable connector in the gripper is very critical for the successful mating process, and conventional mating processes rely on force control or mechanical passive compliance. Nowadays, we notice that collaboration robotic manipulators or small size industrial robotic manipulators attain high accuracy and repeatability levels (sub-millimeter) thus demonstrate very precise position control capacities. Using those capacities of the robotic manipulator, we analyze the permissible error range of connector for the mating process. For that reason, we propose a new design of a gripper for an accurate alignment and holding of the position between the cable and the gripper. Therefore, if we know the exact position of the connector in reference to the gripper, and the tolerance between the connectors is larger than error position of the robot arm, the mating process can be achieved by just using position control of conventional industrial robots.