Robotic Assembly

装配Common

Getting a robot to insert, screw, snap, or clip parts together into a component or finished product.

Assembly is one of the most traditional tasks for industrial robots, and also one of the hardest to fully automate — it includes peg-in-hole insertion, meshing gears, plugging in connectors, tightening nuts, routing belts, and wiring harnesses. The difficulty is that the clearance between mating parts is often tighter than the error in visual localization, so the robot must feel its way to alignment through force sensing or compliant control during contact, making this a classic case of contact-rich manipulation. The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) designed a set of assembly task boards specifically as a benchmark for this. Traditional solutions rely on precision fixtures and taught, programmed motions, which need to be redone whenever the product changes; learning-based methods are starting to fill this gap — NVIDIA's IndustReal, for example, trains an insertion policy with reinforcement learning in simulation and transfers it directly to a real robot arm.

ExampleA robot arm inserts a cylindrical pin into a tightly fitting hole: it moves above the hole, then, using force feedback after contact, fine-tunes its position until aligned before pressing the pin in.

Also called: Assembly
Related: Peg-in-Hole Insertion · Contact-rich Manipulation · Force Control · Compliance Control · Factory / IndustReal · Industrial Robot
Sources: NIST Robotic Grasping and Manipulation for Assembly - Assembly Performance Metrics and Test Methods
IndustReal: Transferring Contact-Rich Assembly Tasks from Simulation to Reality