An Adaptable Robotic System for Assembling Irregular Earphone Parts on Factory Automation

The assembly of earphone parts in electro acoustic factory automation is a challenging problem for industrial robots. The main difficulties come from the fact that conventional industrial robots perform poorly on rapid-updated earphone parts, which are characterized by small size, variety and irregular shapes. What’s worse, the robot cannot adapt to the earphone parts with different poses effectively. In order to tackle above problems, an adaptable robotic system guided by the 3D laser triangulation sensor and six-axis F/T sensor is built in this paper. In addition, to reduce position errors caused by the 3D sensor accidently, an assembly strategy which is implemented by the admittance controller learned from human teaching, is proposed for assembling earphone parts. Specifically, AdaBoost-based GPR method is applied to derive the admittance gain, so that the controller perform effectively. A series of comparative experiments prove that the established system could demonstrate superior performance on the earphone parts with small size, variety and irregular shapes. Furthermore, it is also validated that the assembly strategy could be executed effectively on the earphone parts with different poses.