USB assembly strategy based on visual servoing and impedance control

In this paper, we propose an assembly strategy for the insertion of an USB cable, which is one of the well-known connector cables, into a corresponding USB port. This strategy is required to automate the inspection process of USB ports. In the proposed method, we use the information from the camera and a force/torque sensor to minimize position uncertainties. The features of a USB port are detected by the vision system and the end-effector of the robot quickly moves to the front of the USB port through visual servoing. After that, an impedance controller is adopted to achieve a compliant contact motion and to overcome any existing translational/angular errors. The performance of the proposed USB assembly strategy was evaluated by a series of experiments using a 6 DOF industrial robot equipped with a force/torque sensor.