MOTORCYCLE 1.0: Automating Bimanual Cable Routing Around Fixtures on the NIST Task Board

Automated cable routing requires deformable object manipulation in constrained and cluttered environments. However, achieving reliable routing is challenging due to fixture constraints, cable friction, and the need for slack management. In this work, we introduce MOTORCYCLE 1.0 (Multi-turn Optimized Trajectories for Ordered Routing of Cable Yoking and Cable Loop Execution), a bimanual cable routing method that integrates a learned cable tracer with sliding-based motion planning to achieve desired cable trajectories while ensuring slack control. Unlike previous methods that use single-arm manipulation, MOTORCYCLE 1.0 uses coordinated bimanual sliding motions to dynamically adjust slack to avoid tangling and misrouting. Physical experiments with a modified NIST Task Board 4 demonstrate 84% average success rate across multiple tiers, significantly outperforming a single-arm version.