Development of a Wire Harness Assembly Motion Planner for Redundant Multiple Manipulators

This article discusses a motion planner for manipulating deformable linear objects with multiple manipulators. When multiple manipulators grip a rigid body, hand positions and postures of those manipulators are dependent variables of the positions and postures of the gripped rigid body. On the other hand, when multiple manipulators grip a deformable linear object, constraint conditions are eased compared to those for a rigid body. However, there is another problem: the need for consideration of deformation of a deformable linear object by the motion plan of a robot. In this research, in order to grip and operate such deformable linear objects with multiple manipulators, we developed a sampling-based robot motion planner. By combining basic motions generated by the developed robot motion planner, we will show that a complicated task, such as the assembly of a deformable linear object with the multiple manipulators, is possible. Using the example of a wire harness assembly work on an automobile production line, we perform motion planning using the developed motion planner, and we verify its effectiveness through simulations.