Tactile-Based Manipulation of Wires For Switchgear Assembly

This paper presents a mechatronic approach to the robotic manipulation of electrical wires for switchgear assembly. One of the challenges is the implementation of the wire insertion task, i.e., a wire, grasped by a robot, has to be inserted into the hole of a switchgear component to be then tightened. To this aim, a tactile sensor, installed on the robot gripper, has been optimized and a suitable algorithm has been developed for the wire shape estimation. The same tactile sensor is used to automatically evaluate if the insertion task and the following tightening have been correctly completed. The proposed approach allows to reconstruct the wire end point with a precision sufficient to allow the robot correctly execute the insertion phase with a high success rate. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.