Automatic Offline Teaching of Robots for Ship Block Welding Applications

선체 블록 용접을 위한 효과적 로봇 오프-라인 자동교시 소프트웨어 개발 연구

Computer aided process planning and Offline programming are decisive factors in successful implementation of automated robotic production. However, conventional offline programming procedure has proven ineffective due to time-consuming teaching process for robot programming and due to inefficient system modeling. The paper presents an efficient procedure to semi-automatically generate robot job programs for ship block welding applications. In the research, the teaching positions are automatically determined by predefined rules which are functions of the type and the dimensions of the given welding section of ship block. And a sequence of robot movements and welding conditions such as welding type, welding current, welding speed, and welding torch orientation, are determined by use of Standard Program which is experimentally proved to work well for the welding wection group. Finally, a robot program for the welding section is generated automatically. Based on the algorithm, a offline automatic teaching software is developed. The paper presents also the algorithm and structure of the software.