Robotic Wire Pinning for Wire Harness Assembly Automation

An integrated robotic system is presented that demonstrates feasibility of automating dexterous manipulation of small and flexible components enabling wire pinning associated with industrial wire harness assembly. The task is shared by a human technician and a collaborative robot endowed with advanced intelligence via learned motion primitives and vision-guided control. The developed system and software architecture are described along with features of its primary software modules that provide the enabling robotic intelligence and control including robot manipulation skills, dynamic motion planning, and perception. The first prototype system achieves cycle times comparable to fully manual assembly with high-performing trajectory learning-from-demonstration and vision-guided manipulation as underlying intelligent capabilities. Performance results and thoughts on improvements through future work are presented.