Wiring connector-terminated cables based on manipulation planning with collision-free EMD net

In this paper, we propose a manipulation planning method for cable wiring in the assembly of electric appliances etc. We address a scenario where a robot grasps a connector attached to the end of a cable and has to bring the connector to a socket. To accomplish this automatically, we propose a novel manipulation planning method. The method extends the Encode-Manipulate-Decode network (EMD net), which can predict shape changes of deformable objects and generate robot motion sequences for producing desired shape transitions. This enables us to find connector trajectories that avoid collision between the cable and the surrounding environment. We conducted experiments with several different cable lengths. We also introduce some functions required for real-world wiring, such as online cable shape modification. Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve stable manipulation of real cables.