Set-Membership-Based Fault Detection and Isolation for Robotic Assembly of Electrical Connectors

This paper addresses the fault detection and isolation (FDI) problem for robotic assembly of electrical connectors in the framework of set-membership. Both the fault-free and faulty cases of assembly are modeled by different switched linear models with known switching sequences, bounded parameters, and external disturbances. The locations of switching points of each model are assumed to be inside some areas but the accurate positions are not clear. Given current input/output data, the feasible parameter set of fault-free switched linear model is obtained by sequentially calculating an optimal ellipsoid. If the pair of data is not consistent with any possible submodel, a fault is then detected. The isolation of fault is realized by checking the consistency between the data sequence and each possible fault model one by one. The robustness of the proposed FDI algorithms is proved. The effectiveness of these algorithms is verified by the robotic assembly experiments of mating electrical connectors. Note to Practitioners-In modern robotic assembly tasks, the industrial robots often need to manipulate tiny objects with complex structure. Electrical connectors are a typical kind of these objects and widely used in many industrial fields. To avoid damaging the fragile connectors and accelerate the assembly process, it is required to promptly detect and isolate the certain assembly fault in real time so that the robot can immediately implement an error recovery procedure according to the identified fault. The proposed set-membership-based fault detection and isolation (FDI) methodology satisfies both the timing and fault-isolation requirements for this kind of robotic assembly task. In terms of the set-membership theory, no false alarm will occur if there are sufficient training data for the proposed method. In addition, it turns out that the proposed method can signal an alarm faster than conventional residual-based FDI method from plentiful experiments. Although only the robotic assembly of electrical connectors is investigated, our FDI method can also be applied in the assembly task of other small and complex parts. This is especially useful for increasing the productivity and promoting the automation level of electronic industries.