Method For Creating A Control Cabinet Model With Realistic Wires

During the assembly of a control cabinet, a major time-consuming step is the wiring of the included components. Hence, automating this step will noticeably reduce production costs. According to the planning, wires are routed through wire ducts and connected to components. While a comprehensive digital twin can be computed for the included components, this twin is missing a proper modelling of the connecting wires. For these, only a rough route through the wire ducts is given. However, a physically plausible model is an important prerequisite to perform reliable path planning for automated assembly. The paper addresses this need for accurate wire path computation during automated cabinet assembly and introduces a method to compute realistic wire paths through the wire ducts. Different models with and without a fixed wire length are presented and compared. An evolutionary algorithm optimizes the corresponding variables of the models. As described, both approaches yield valid paths, although the fixed length model appears to be able to compute more realistic paths

Investigation of Wire Mark Reading Methods to Support Automatic Quality Control

During the assembly of a control cabinet, a worker obstructs many individual configured wires. To distinguish these wires, a printer plots an identifying text on each end of the wires. However, due to the shape of the wires and the printing process, the quality of these markings is often too low, and it is hard or impossible to read the marking. Common reasons are a low contrast or a blurred text. By now, there is no quality check of the marking after a crimping machine produced the wire. This paper investigates methods for wire mark reading that is required to estimate the quality of the marking. By using optical character recognition, the likeliness that a worker can read the marking must be computed. In the final solution, the quality check of the marking will be implemented within an automated quality check that is located after the printing process. With this, the crimping machine can then discard wires of low quality and reproduce them instantly