Robust Peg-in-Hole Assembly under Uncertainties via Compliant and Interactive Contact-Rich Manipulation
Journal:
arXiv
Published Date:
Jun 28, 2025
Abstract
Robust and adaptive robotic peg-in-hole assembly under tight tolerances is
critical to various industrial applications. However, it remains an open
challenge due to perceptual and physical uncertainties from contact-rich
interactions that easily exceed the allowed clearance. In this paper, we study
how to leverage contact between the peg and its matching hole to eliminate
uncertainties in the assembly process under unstructured settings. By examining
the role of compliance under contact constraints, we present a manipulation
system that plans collision-inclusive interactions for the peg to 1)
iteratively identify its task environment to localize the target hole and 2)
exploit environmental contact constraints to refine insertion motions into the
target hole without relying on precise perception, enabling a robust solution
to peg-in-hole assembly. By conceptualizing the above process as the
composition of funneling in different state spaces, we present a formal
approach to constructing manipulation funnels as an uncertainty-absorbing
paradigm for peg-in-hole assembly. The proposed system effectively generalizes
across diverse peg-in-hole scenarios across varying scales, shapes, and
materials in a learning-free manner. Extensive experiments on a NIST Assembly
Task Board (ATB) and additional challenging scenarios validate its robustness
in real-world applications.
