Clevis and Tenon Assembly Using Visual Guiding Fields

This paper presents a visual servoing strategy for a clevis and tenon joint assembly as typically performed in aircraft manufacturing. The desired velocity in the image acquired by the cameras observing the parts is extracted from a vector field that guides the motion of the moving part so that it follows an accurate 3D straight line trajectory. The vector field is designed so that it is continuous and globally exponentially stable whatever the initial configuration. The strategy has been successfully implemented and validated on a full-scale demonstrator, with coarse camera localization, while ensuring an assembly without any collision thanks to a maximal error less than 1 mm along a 10 cm trajectory.