Vision-Based Robotic Grasping and Manipulation of USB Wires

The fast expanding 3C (Computer, Communication, and Consumer electronics) manufacturing leads to a high demand on the fabrication of USB cables. While several commercial machines have been developed to automate the process of stripping and soldering of USB cables, the operation of manipulating USB wires according to the color code is heavily dependent on manual works because of the deformation property of wires, probably resulting in the falling-off or the escape of wires during manipulation. In this paper, a new vision-based controller is proposed for robotic grasping and manipulation of USB wires. A novel two-level structure is developed and embedded into the controller, where Level-I is referred to as the grasping and manipulation of wires, and Level-II is referred to as the wire alignment by following the USB color code. The proposed formulation allows the robot to automatically grasp, manipulate, and align the wires in a sequential, simultaneous, and smooth manner, and hence to deal with the deformation of wires. The dynamic stability of the closed-loop system is rigorously proved with Lyapunov methods, and experiments are performed to validate the proposed controller.