High-Speed Manipulation of Cable Connector Using a High-Speed Robot Hand

Higher speed and accuracy in object manipulation have recently been required in manufacturing and factory automation (FA) lines. In this paper, we propose a method of using a high-speed robot hand to manipulate connectors and cables, whose coordinates are detected by a high-speed visual-servoing system. This research on robot manipulation will be productive from a practical viewpoint and will lead to dramatic time and cost reductions in FA. Grasping and inserting motions are performed by a high-speed robot, and the orientations of connectors are acquired by detecting their corners with a highspeed vision system. In addition, we applied a slight vibration to one of the connectors from the robot finger to compensate for position errors between the pair of connectors, which cannot be sufficiently solved by manipulation of the robot hand itself because of its minuteness.