A Study on a Visual Sensor System for Weld Seam Tracking in Robotic GMA Welding

GMA 용접로봇용 용접선 시각 추적 시스템에 관한 연구

In this study, we constructed a preview-sensing visual sensor system for weld seam tracking in real time in GMA welding. A sensor part consists of a CCD camera, a band-pass filter, a diode laser system with a cylindrical lens, and a vision board for inter frame process. We used a commercialized robot system which includes a GMA welding machine. To extract the weld seam we used a inter frame process in vision board from that we could remove the noise due to the spatters and fume in the image. Since the image was very reasonable by using the inter frame process, we could use the simplest way to extract the weld seam from the image, such as first differential and central difference method. Also we used a moving average method to the successive position data of weld seam for reducing the data fluctuation. In experiment the developed robot system with visual sensor could be able to track a most popular weld seam, such as a fillet-joint, a V-groove, and a lap-joint of which weld seam include planar and height directional variation.