Design of a Gripper for Cable Assembly with Integrated In-hand Cable Manipulation Functions

Cable manipulation is widely used in industrial production (e.g., assembly of automotive wiring harnesses, wiring of electrical products etc.). Currently it is realized mainly by manual work in industry, which requires a lot of labor and time, and lacks flexibility. It is a challenge for a robot to operate cables, because when a robot grips a cable, it needs to perform many types of operations (e.g., twisting, dragging, sliding etc.) according to the pose and topological state of the cable. Traditionally these functions are realized by moving the robot arm with respect to the point where the cable is gripped. It is inefficient in many situations. To solve the aforementioned problems, in this paper, we propose a design of gripper integrated with functions for in-hand manipulation of cables. The validation experiments demonstrated its effectiveness and potential usage in solving many difficult problems involved in cable assembly.