MCFR: A Mask-Guided Coarse-to-Fine Regression Framework for Robust Multi-Variant Board-to-Board Connector Assembly

Abstract:Automated insertion of board-to-board (BTB) connectors in 3C manufacturing requires both high visual accuracy and strong deployment robustness. This problem remains challenging because multi-variant connectors exhibit significant morphological and appearance variations, making stable cross-variant generalization difficult, while the mismatch between training and deployment under fixed-view inspection settings induces background spurious correlation and degrades real-world performance. To address these issues, this paper proposes MCFR, a Mask-Guided Coarse-to-Fine Regression framework for multi-variant BTB connector assembly. By introducing an object-aware mask prior and explicit photometric refinement, the proposed method suppresses background interference and improves alignment accuracy and robustness in practical deployment. Experiments on a self-constructed multi-variant dataset, a BTB batch insertion testbed, and a real smartphone assembly task show that MCFR consistently outperforms representative baselines and achieves an average real-world insertion success rate of 99.25%. These results demonstrate the effectiveness and practical potential of MCFR for automated assembly of multi-variant BTB connectors.

8 pages, 7 figures, 1 table. Accepted for presentation at the 2026 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2026). Finalist for the IROS Best Paper Award for Industrial Robotics Research for Applications

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2610.09327 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2610.09327v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.09327 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)