Automated Terminal-to-Housing Assembly System for Flat Ribbon Cable Harness

This paper presents a sensor-minimal automated assembly system for bidirectional single-row flat ribbon cable harnesses (FRCHs). Unlike conventional peg-in-hole or single-terminal insertion tasks, FRCH assembly involves mechanically coupled multi-terminal insertion under flexible and dense geometric constraints. To address this problem, the proposed system performs the assembly through a purely mechanical sequence consisting of Cable Alignment, Lean & Slide, Weaving, and Clamping, without relying on active sensing or vision. Each mechanism is designed to progressively reduce correlated terminal misalignment, insertion interference, and instability before final locking. Experiments on bidirectional single-row FRCHs achieved an 83.75% end-to-end process success rate over 80 trials, with success rates of 85.0% and 82.5% in the first and second halves, respectively. The cycle time was 33 s under half-speed operation. To the best of our knowledge, this work presents the first automated prototype for FRCH terminal-to-housing assembly for multi-pin housings.