Admittance matrix design for force-guided assembly

The authors address the design of manipulator admittance for reliable force-guided assembly. Their goal is to design the admittance of the manipulator so that, at all possible bounded part misalignments, the contact forces always lead to error-reducing motions. If this objective can be accomplished for a given pair of mating parts, the parts are called force-assemblable. As a testbed application of manipulator admittance design for force-guided assembly, the authors investigate the insertion of a workpiece into a fixture consisting of multiple rigid fixture to be one for which there exists an admittance matrix that ensures the unique positioning of a workpiece despite initial positional error. It is shown that, in the absence of friction, all deterministic fixtures are linearly force-assemblable. How to design an admittance matrix that guarantees that the workpiece will be guided into the deterministic fixture by the fixel contact forces alone is shown.>