Automated testing of electrical cable harnesses

One technical challenge in promoting robotic applications in small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) is to automate testing and assembly operations, which are usually performed by human operators due to a high cost and limited flexibility of robotic systems. In this paper, the automation of electric cable harnesses is focused, hardware and software architectures are modularized to maximize the system capability to test a variety of harnesses and simplify system designs. A new testing system is proposed, its design is discussed in details, and its performance has been validated by the experiments over the prototyped instrumentation. It has shown that the modularized testing system is able to test a wide scope of harnesses in a cost-effective way; it outperformed human operators significantly in terms of testing time and reliability. The proposed approach of modularization can be extended in developing other solutions of automation in SMEs due to its potential in increasing system flexibility and reducing system cost.