Robotic Wires Manipulation for Switchgear Cabling and Wiring Harness Manufacturing

This paper describes the development of a system for a wiring operation, composed by a robotic manipulator and a gripper with tactile sensors. The manipulation of electrical wires, and more in general deformable linear objects, is a challenging task of large interest in many industrial applications. The solution studied, is designed to shape a cable along a given path with fixing points and obstacles exploited to shape the cable itself. The wire position is determined starting from a list of point and then converted to a joint reference pose for the manipulator. Moreover, tension of the wire is controlled on the basis of both the estimation of the robot external wrench and the tactile data by acting on the gripper finger opening. An experimental setup in which a cable must be routed along two linear paths connected by a turn and with four fixing points has been used to validate the proposed solution