Human modeled robot screw fastening

Among the various manufacturing operations automated with robots, screw fastening is one of the most common. In order to perform it, industrial manipulators require specialised end-effector tools to be hooked at their wrist-end. This paper does not propose a substitute for such tools. It simply shows that the operation of fastening a large threaded nut to a matching threaded bolt can be performed within a behaviour-based assembly architecture by means of an opportune behavioural module loosely modeled on how humans would accomplish the same task with their bare hands. The paper presents its development and the relative experiments for testing it run on a group of three similar electric torch kits.