Abstract—In the industrial assembly of flexible printed
circuits (FPCs), the FPC connectors and receivers are required
to connect successfully with the least possible buckling times.
However, precise and autonomous positioning of the FPC
connectors is still a great challenge, as they are very small and
visually blocked during assembly. This article proposes a
strategy for the industrial assembly of FPC by: 1) unlike the
traditional vision based methods, the task of FPC position
identification in this work is considered as a haptic signals
alignment problem.We mount a haptic sensor at the top end of
the robotic arm manipulator and record various mismatched
haptic signals around the ideal FPC connector position;
2) converting both the correct and incorrect haptic signals into
images; and 3) we introduce a novel deep Siamese-network
(DSN) structure to align the incorrect haptic images to the
ground truth. The experiments are carried out on a practical
FPC assembly platform for the Redmi Note 11 mobile phone. It
is found that the haptic images combined with DSN can
significantly improve the FPC location accuracy. When the
buckle times are limited to 10, 5, and 1, the proposed method
outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in a realistic FPC
assembly platform.