3-D vision sensor for arc welding industrial robot system with coordinated motion

In order to obtain desired arc welding performance, we already developed an arc welding robot system that enabled coordinated motions of dual arm robots. In this system one robot arm holds a welding target as a positioning device, and the other robot moves the welding torch. Concerning to such a dual arm robot system, the positioning accuracy of robots is one important problem, since nowadays conventional industrial robots unfortunately don't have enough absolute accuracy in position. In order to cope with this problem, our robot system employed teaching playback method, where absolute error are compensated by the operator's visual feedback. Due to this system, an ideal arc welding considering the posture of the welding target and the directions of the gravity has become possible. Another problem still remains, while we developed an original teaching method of the dual arm robots with coordinated motions. The problem is that manual teaching tasks are still tedious since they need fine movements with intensive attentions. Therefore, we developed a 3-dimensional vision guided robot control method for our welding robot system with coordinated motions. In this paper we show our 3-dimensional vision sensor to guide our arc welding robot system with coordinated motions. A sensing device is compactly designed and is mounted on the tip of the arc welding robot. The sensor detects the 3-dimensional shape of groove on the target work which needs to be weld. And the welding robot is controlled to trace the grooves with accuracy. The principle of the 3-dimensional measurement is depend on the slit-ray projection method. In order to realize a slit-ray projection method, two laser slit-ray projectors and one CCD TV camera are compactly mounted. Tactful image processing enabled 3-dimensional data processing without suffering from disturbance lights. The 3-dimensional information of the target groove is combined with the rough teaching data they are given by the operator in advance. Therefore, the teaching tasks are simplified