로보트 아크용접에서 시각인식장치를 이용한 용접선의 추적

The aim of this paper is to present the development of visual seam tracking system equipped with visual range finder. The visual range finder, which consists of a CCD camera and a diode laser system with line generating optics, developed to recognize the types of weld joints and detect the location of weld joints. In practical applications, however, images of the weld joints are often degraded due to spatters, are flares, surface specularity, and welding smoke. To overcome the problem, this paper proposes a syntactic approach which is a class of artificial intelligence techniques. In the approach, the type of weld joint is inferred based upon the production rules which are linguiques grammars consisting of a set of line and junction primitives of laser strip image projected on weld joint. The production rules eliminate several noisy primitives to create new primitives through the merging process of primitives. After the recognition of weld joint, arc welding is started and the location of weld joints is repeatedly detected using a spring model-based template matching in which the template model is a by-product of the recognition process of weld joint. To show the effectiveness of the proposed approach a series of experiments-identification and robotic tracking-are conducted for four different types of weld joints.