Towards the Automation of Wire Harness Manufacturing: A Robotic Manipulator with Sensorized Fingers

Despite modern industries are becoming increasingly automated, wire harness manufacturing processes still rely on manual assembly. One of the reasons behind the difficulty in making the process automatic is that wire harnesses and cable assemblies are highly customized products depending on the application. Hence, realizing an industrial automatic machine for the production of a specific wire harness is not affordable, and manual production remains the most cost-effective. A step towards the automation of wire harness manufacturing is the realization of a system that can be easily adapted to produce different types of cable assemblies. This paper proposes a system composed of a robotic arm, a gripper, and sensorized fingers for executing a wire harness manipulation task. The system can be easily adapted to produce different products by updating the order of operations, the trajectories, and the dimensions/positioning of some low cost mechanical parts.