Robotic wiring harness assembly system for fault-tolerant electric connectors mating

A robotic wiring harness assembly system, basing on vision and force/torque sensors, is developed to realize mating of electric connectors. In this system, cameras are firstly used to detect the position and the pose of a grasped connector, and then the corresponding bias is calculated roughly to guarantee the connector can be contacted with the other opposite part. After that, a force/torque sensor is used to detect and judge the contact styles to assist system in applying searching and inserting strategies correspondingly. The experiment results show the proposed system can detect and diagnose the position errors occurring in the assembly process correctly, and realize error recovery automatically and mating successfully. It reveals that the fault-tolerable capability of the proposed system is improved evidently.