A Study on Error Recovery Search Strategies of Electronic Connector Mating for Robotic Fault-Tolerant Assembly

Automatic mating of electronic connectors is an indispensable process for a wiring harness assembly system on assembly line of electrical elements. It is therefore key technology to develop error recovery method when the connector mating process is jammed. This paper presents four search strategies for electronic connectors mating with initial uncertain position error. For each method, we study the relationship between the force sensor signal and relative position within connector pair. We also study the search space requirements for each method since there is not always enough room existed for connector searching. Performance of each method is finally studied by both theoretical and experimental analysis. The experiment results show that the proposed strategies can diagnose the position errors occurring in the assembly process correctly, and realize error recovery effectively.