Concept for Robot-Based Cable Assembly Regarding Industrial Production

Abstract

The assembly of cables in industrial production is still a largely manually performed task. Therefore, automatic cable assembly offers much potential in terms of efficiency. The major challenge of automating this task lies in the formlessness of the cables, which entails unknown and inconstant states of the assembly objects. In this paper, a process chain and a concept are presented for the automated cable assembly in an industrial context. The process chain consists of five process steps, which are used to structure existing approaches and system configurations for automated cable assembly from a production technology perspective. The emphasis is on the coverage of the process steps and the system technology. The presented concept represents an approach for robotic cable assembly focusing on the flexibility to process multiple product variants. Basis for the ability to handle a variety of variants is the avoidance of a forced shape on the cables. For this approach, system technology as well as challenges and possible solutions are presented.