• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 1995.10a
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• pp.1105-1109
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• 1995

A CCD-camera, which is structured with vision system, was used to realize automatic seam-tracking system and 3-D information which is needed to generate torch path, was obtained by using laser-slip beam. To extract laser strip and obtain welding-specific point, Adaptive Hough-transformation was used. Although the basic Hough transformation takes too much time to process image on line, it has a tendency to be robust to the noises as like spatter. For that reson, it was complemented with Adaptive Hough transformation to have an on-line processing ability for scanning a welding-specific point. the dead zone,where the sensing of weld line is impossible, is eliminated by rotating the camera with its rotating axis centered at welding torch. The camera angle is controlled so as to get the minimum image data for the sensing of weld line, hence the image processing time is reduced. The fuzzy controller is adapted to control the camera angle.

• Proceedings of the KSME Conference
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• 2003.04a
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• pp.917-922
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• 2003

In this paper, a high speed rotating arc sensor for automatic fillet welding is introduced. In order to track the welding seam, The high speed rotating arc sensor is used. The welding tip of a high speed rotating arc sensor rotates about 3000 rpm using DC motor. The rotating torch is driven by gear between welding torch body and wire guide. The welding current is measured by using the current sensor and rot at ing position sensor. To realize the welding seam tracking algorithm with accuracy, a software filter algorithm using the moving average method is applied to the measured welding current in the microprocessor. The welding mobile robot with two wheels and two sliders is developed for fillet welding. The welding mobile robot can control its traveling direction and turn itself around the corner. The effectiveness is proven through the experimental results conducted with varied fillet tracking patterns.

• Journal of Welding and Joining
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.70-75
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• 2000

The weld seam tracking system for arc welding process uses various kinds of sensors such as arc sensor, vision sensor, laser displacement and so on. Among the variety of sensors available, electro-magnetic sensor is one of the most useful methods especially in sheet metal butt-joint arc welding, primarily because it is hardly affected by the intense arc light and fume generated during the welding process, and also by the surface condition of weldments. In this study, a dual-electromagnetic sensor, which utilizes the induced current variation in the sensing coil due to the eddy current variation of the metal near the sensor, was developed for arc welding of sheet metal butt-joints. The dual-electromagnetic sensor thus detects the offset displacement of weld line from the center of sensor head even though there's no clearance in the joint. A set of design variables of the sensor were determined for the maximum sensing capability through the repeated experiments. Seam tracking is performed by correcting the position of sensor to the amount of offset displacement every sampling period. From the experimental results, the developed sensor showed the excellent capability of weld seam detection when the sensor to workpiece distance is near less than 5 mm, and it was revealed that the system has excellent seam tracking ability for the butt-joint of sheet metal.

• Journal of Welding and Joining
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.65-74
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• 1995

The weld seam tracking sensor is indispensable to improve the flexibility of automatic arc welding systems. Among the position sensing methods available, a laser displacement sensor is one of the most prevailing methods. In this study, a laser displacement sensor was examined on detecting the weld seam of lap joints in sheet metal arc welding. The output signal of the laser displacement sensor may ontain severe fluctuation from the effect of arc light, spatters, fume, etc. So a variety of signal processing methods was applied to smooth the output signal of the sensor. And then the weld joint was determined by using the central difference method. It was revealed that the quadratic mean method plays an important role in detecting the weld seam during welding especially.

• Journal of Welding and Joining
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.20-28
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• 1991

The main subject of this study is the construction of an automatic welding system that has the capability to trace the weld seam in GMA welding of lap joints. The system was composed of a vision sensor, moving torch, and personal computer(IBM-PC). In the developed vision sensor, an image was captured by the frame grabber at the time of short circuit during welding. The threshold method was adopted for determining the structured light and the central difference method for detecting the weld joint. And the seam tracing of the torch was performed by using the data regeneration algorithm. In this system using the image at the time of short circuit, weld seam tracking was performed without any relations to arc light and spatters.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.23 no.7 s.184
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• pp.59-66
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• 2006

In laser welding, automatic seam tracking is important to adjust the laser head position in real time as it moves along the seam. Also if the joint gap is occurred, filling the missing material into the joint gap is necessary to prevent welding defects and bad welding quality. In general, the joint gap width is not constant along the seam due to a variety of reason. So it is essential to control the filler wire speed into the joint gap to acquire good welding quality. This paper describes an intelligent filler wire feeding device which can control 3-dimensional seam tracking and the filler wire speed by measuring the gap position and the joint gap width in laser welding. We call this device as Smart Micro Control system(SMC). To achieve this objective, we assessed weld quality in 2mm sheets of A16061 which had various gap width by using the developed device. From the experimental results, It was found the possibility that the developed device could be used in welding various 3-dimensional structures.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.24 no.10
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• pp.64-74
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• 2007

Because of the size and environment in the shipbuilding process, the portable type robot is required for the automatic seam tracking. For this reason, the structure of laser sensor should be considered in the initial design step and the coordinate transformation between welding robot and laser sensor, which is joint finder, must be identified exactly and the real time tracking algorithm based on these consideration could be developed. In this research, laser displacement sensor in which its structure is laser beam's vertical projection, is developed to recognize the location of weld joint. In practical applications, however, images of weld joints are often degraded because of the surface specularity or spatter. To overcome the problem, the constrained joint finding algorithm is proposed. In the approach of coordinate conversion rule for the visual feedback control among welding torch, robot body and laser sensor is applied by the same reference point method. In the real time seam tracking algorithms we propose constrained sampling method which uses look ahead distance. The RLS(Recursive Least Square) filter is applied to obtain the smooth tracking path from the sensitive edge data. From the experimental results, we could see the possibility that the developed laser sensor with proposed processing algorithm and real time seam tracking method can be used as a welding under the shipbuilding condition.

• Proceedings of the KWS Conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.139-141
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• 1996

Among various welding parameters, the welding current which is inversely proportional to the tip-to-workpiece distance in GMAW is an essential parameter to monitor the GMAW process of horizontal fillet joints. For the case of weld defect such as overlap in horizontal fillet welding, therefore, the signal processing for process monitoring or automatic seam tracking should be modified by considering the weld pool surface geometry including the corresponding weld defect. In other words, the adequate signal processing algorithm is indispensible to improve the performance of the arc sensor. However, arc sensor algorithm already developed usually focus on weld seam tracing but do not considering the weld qualities. In this paper, various experiments were carried out to investigate the tendencies of the weld defects when weaving motion is added, and the experimental method based on 2$^n$ factorial design was proposed for deriving the mathematical model between the leg length and the various welding conditions. Moreover, a signal processing method based on the artificial neural network(Adaptive Resonance Theory) was proposed far discriminating the current signal of sound weld beads from that of weld beads with overlap. Finally, the algorithm for weld seam tracking combined with the mathematical modeling and the signal processing method was carried out to track the weld line in conjunction with the improvement of the weld qualities. The reliability of the proposed algorithms were evaluated through various experiments, which showed that the proposed algorithms could be effectively used for arc welding automation.

• Proceedings of the KWS Conference
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• 1999.10a
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• pp.51-54
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• 1999

• Proceedings of the KWS Conference
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• 1995.10a
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• pp.89-93
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• 1995