Robotic Compliant Assembly Strategy for Radio Frequency Connectors With Initial Positioning Errors

Robotic assembly shows great potential compared with manual assembly in repeat tasks because of its efficiency. However, for components like Radio Frequency (RF) connectors, their complex structures, tiny features and susceptibility to damage pose a high demand for accuracy in robotic assembly. An appropriate assembly strategy is necessarily required when there are initial positioning errors during the assembly process. This letter proposes a robotic compliant assembly strategy for RF connectors. By analyzing the various contact states of the RF connectors with initial errors, we define a special contact state, the slot-jamming state. Centered around this state, the Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) is adopted to preliminarily predict position errors and a virtual rotation center strategy is introduced to reduce the initial positioning errors. In addition, we develop a hybrid admittance controller to solve the prediction errors from the KAN and the potential extreme force caused by the imbalance of the rotation and admittance speed. Assembly experiments are conducted, achieving a high assembly success rate with contact force within 7 N during the adjustment phase and verifying the generalization ability and stability of the proposed methods.