Chopstick-Inspired Non-Prehensile Manipulation for Datacenter Automation

  • Andromachi Chatzieleftheriou, Microsoft; Harshit Khurana; Elliott Hogg

Automating repair and maintenance tasks in datacenters requires robots to operate in dense cable environments
where overlapping cables occlude target components and must be displaced without damage. Traditional prehensile approaches are impractical in such settings due to the difficulty of isolating individual cables and the risk of entanglement. We present a non-prehensile cable parting approach using a chopstick-inspired tool that slides between cables and creates localized clearance around a target transceiver port. The tool and motion primitives are designed to enable safe cable displacement without requiring explicit force sensing or cable-specific planning. We evaluate the approach across randomized cable configurations in both a MuJoCo physics simulation and real-world experiments using a dual-arm UR5e system, where one arm performs cable decluttering and a second arm inserts a transceiver into the cleared port. Results are demonstrated across different cable environments, and successful end-to-end transceiver insertion is achieved in the integrated multi-robot pipeline.

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