Robotic assembly of complex planar parts: An experimental evaluation

In this paper we present an experimental evaluation of automatic robotic assembly of complex planar parts. The torque-controlled DLR light-weight robot, equipped with an on-board camera (eye-in-hand configuration), is committed with the task of looking for given parts on a table, picking them, and inserting them inside the corresponding holes on a movable plate. Visual servoing techniques are used for fine positioning over the selected part/hole, while insertion is based on active compliance control of the robot and robust assembly planning in order to align the parts automatically with the hole. Execution of the complete task is validated through extensive experiments, and performance of humans and robot are compared in terms of overall execution time.