The manufacturing assembly process includes the manipulation of rigid and non-rigid parts. This paper discusses a method for the estimation of the cables' shape for robotic manipulation. The paper uses methods that take into account the mechanical behaviour of materials. More specifically, in the framework of static analyses, a higher-order analytic model of cables is introduced and the need for model calibration is pointed out. To this effect, analytical solutions are compared against experimental data. In addition, the performance of computational models is taken into consideration.