CaRoBio: 3D Cable Routing with a Bio-inspired Gripper Fingernail
This addresses cable routing in industrial automation, offering a novel solution for deformable linear object manipulation, though it is incremental in improving existing robotic grasping and guiding techniques.
The paper tackles the challenge of robot cable routing by designing an eagle-inspired fingernail for grippers and developing an end-to-end 3D framework, which significantly outperforms pick-and-place methods under equivalent conditions.
The manipulation of deformable linear flexures has a wide range of applications in industry, such as cable routing in automotive manufacturing and textile production. Cable routing, as a complex multi-stage robot manipulation scenario, is a challenging task for robot automation. Common parallel two-finger grippers have the risk of over-squeezing and over-tension when grasping and guiding cables. In this paper, a novel eagle-inspired fingernail is designed and mounted on the gripper fingers, which helps with cable grasping on planar surfaces and in-hand cable guiding operations. Then we present a single-grasp end-to-end 3D cable routing framework utilizing the proposed fingernails, instead of the common pick-and-place strategy. Continuous control is achieved to efficiently manipulate cables through vision-based state estimation of task configurations and offline trajectory planning based on motion primitives. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed framework with a variety of cables and channel slots, significantly outperforming the pick-and-place manipulation process under equivalent perceptual conditions. Our reconfigurable task setting and the proposed framework provide a reference for future cable routing manipulations in 3D space.