Assembly path planning of cable harness based on reduced-dimensional equilibrium sampling

Aiming at the difficulty on solving Assembly Path Problem (APP) of flexible cable harness automatically in complex products, an assembly path planning of cable harness was proposed based on Reduced-dimensional Equilibrium Sampling (RES). The Cosserat elastic rod theory was used for physical property modeling of cable harness. To plan the assembly path with sampling-based method, the guiding path was introduced to reduce the deformation space dimension of deformable objects. In the reduced-dimensional equilibrium space along the guiding path, the probabilistic roadmap was generated by sampling both end constraints of cable harness. A set of feasible equilibrium which was also the assembly path planning result was found. A cable assembly path planning system was developed and the proposed approach was tested on several scenarios for demonstration.