• International Journal of Korean Welding Society
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.45-51
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• 2002

In the multi-pass welding of pressure vessels or ships, the mechanical touch sensor system is generally used together with a manipulator to measure the gap and depth of the narrow gap to perform seam tracking. Unfortunately, such mechanical touch sensors may commit measuring errors caused by the deterioration of the measuring device. An automation system of narrow gap multi-pass welding using a laser vision system which can track the seam line of narrow gap and which can control welding power has been developed. The joint profile of the narrow gap, with 250mm depth and 28mm width, can be captured by laser vision camera. The image is then processed for defining tracking positions of the torch during welding. Then, the real-time correction of lateral and vertical position of the torch can be done by the laser vision system. The adaptive control of welding conditions like welding currents and welding speeds, can also be performed by the laser vision system, which cannot be done by conventional mechanical touch systems. The developed automation system will be adopted to reduce the idle time of welders, which happens frequently in conventional long welding processes, and to improve the reliability of the weld quality as well.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.76-82
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• 2000

An arc sensor system to compensate positional errors was developed on the foundation of sensor interface system to make use of the on-line shift function of industrial welding robot. Investigating the on-line shift function, we examine the quantitative relationship between the deviation from programmed path and the correction data transferred from personal computer to robot controller. The number of input parameters for weld seam tracking can be reduced by making the relationship between the deviation and the correction data during half weaving be the function of only cross time. With the results of weld seam tracking for the butt joint with V-groove and fillet joint of sheet metal, good performance was implemented. By developing the sensor interface system to compensate the positional errors, industrial welding robot can be expected to contribute to the promotion of welding automation.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.23 no.10
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• pp.7-13
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• 2006

• Proceedings of the KWS Conference
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• 2000.10a
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• pp.34-36
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• 2000

It is difficult to realize automation of welding of lattice type in shipbuilding and assembly processing of shipbuilding and steel structures. Usually, the welding parts of lattice type are welded manually. So there are limitations in continuous and stable quality controls and in increase in productivity because the welding quality depends on worker's skill. That is, automation in welding is necessary. This paper shows shows the development results of a moblie robot for welding of lattice type. Specially. algorithms for its mobile speed and seam tracking controls are introduced.

• 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.

• Journal of Welding and Joining
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• v.16 no.5
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• pp.119-133
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• 1998

To implement full automation in pipe welding, it si most important to develop special sensors and their related systems which act like human operator when detecting irregular groove conditions. In this study, an automatic pipe Gas Metal Arc Welding (GMAW) system was proposed to full control pipe welding procedure with intelligent sensor systems. A five-axes manipulator was proposed for welding torch to automatically access to exact welding position when pipe size and welding angle were given. Pool status and torch position were measured by using a weld-pool image monitoring and processing technique in root-pass welding for weld seam tracking and weld pool control. To overcome the intensive arc light, pool image was captured at the instance of short circuit of welding power loop. Captured image was processed to determine weld pool shape. For weld seam tracking, the relative distance of a torch position from the pool center was calculated in the extracted pool shape to move torch just onto the groove center. To control penetration of root pas, gap was calculated in the extracted pool image, and then weld conditions were controlled for obtaining appropriate penetration. welding speed was determined with a fuzzy logic, and welding current and voltage were determined from a data base to correspond to the gap. For automatic fill-pass welding, the function of human operator of real time weld seam control can be substituted by a sensor system. In this study, an arc sensor system was proposed based on a fuzzy control logic. Using the proposed automatic system, root-pass welding of pipe which had gap variation was assured to be appropriately controlled in welding conditions and in torch position by showing sound welding result and good seam tracking capability. Fill-pass welding by the proposed system also showed very successful result by tracking along the offset welding line without any control of human operator.

• Journal of Welding and Joining
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.49-54
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• 2007

Since the wall thickness can be up to 6" or greater, welds must be made in many layers, each layer containing several passes. However, the welding time for the conventional welding processes such as SAW(Submerged Arc Welding) and FCAW(Flux Cored Arc Welding) can be required many hours. The aim of this paper is to develop a high speed welding system with multi-torch and laser vision sensor for increasing the production speed on the line and to remove the need for the operator so that the system can run automatically for the complete multi-torch multi-layer weld. It was shown that the developed laser vision sensor and analysis of arc blow for multi-torch were effective for multi-pass seam tracking and stable arc. A new automated multi-torch welding systems for thick wall applications has been proved in several production lines.

• International Journal of Precision Engineering and Manufacturing
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• v.4 no.6
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• pp.20-28
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• 2003

This paper presents development of a high speed rotating arc sensor system using a microprocessor based controller with tracking function for a complicate curved fillet welding line, The welding tip connected to the torch body is eccentrically positioned from the centerline of the torch, The area during one rotating cycle is divided into 4 regions of front, rear, right and left in welding direction of the torch tip to determine the horizontal deviation between the welding seam and the torch position. The average value at each region is calculated using the regional current values and a low pass filter incorporated with the moving average method is implemented. The effectiveness of the developed system is proven through the experimental results for several kinds of complicate curved fillet welding lines.

• Journal of Welding and Joining
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• v.17 no.6
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• pp.90-99
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• 1999

Significant portion of the total manufacturing time for a pipe fabrication process is spent on the welding following primary machining and fit-up processes. To achieve a reliable weld bead appearance, automatic seam tracking and adaptive control to fill the groove are urgently needed. For the seam tracking in welding processes, the vision sensors have been successfully applied. However, the adaptive filling control of the multi-torches system for the appropriate welded area has not been implemented in the area of SAW(submerged arc welding) by now. The term adaptive control is often used to describe recent advances in welding process control by strictly this only applies to a system which is able to cope with dynamic changes in system performance. In welding applications, the term adaptive control may not imply the conventional control theory definition but may be used in the more descriptive sense to explain the need for the process to adapt to the changing welding conditions. This paper proposed various types of methodologies for obtaining a good bead appearance based on multi-torches welding system with the vision system in SAW. The methodologies for adaptive filling control used welding current/voltage, arc voltage/welding current/wire feed speed combination and welding speed by using vision sensor. It was shown that the algorithm for welding current/voltage combination and welding speed revealed sound weld bead appearance compared with that of voltage/current combination.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Machine Tool Engineers
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• v.16 no.6
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• pp.71-78
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• 2007

There have been continuous efforts to automate welding processes. This automation process could be said to fall into two categories, weld seam tracking and weld quality evaluation. Recently, the attempts to achieve these two functions simultaneously are on the increase. For the study presented in this paper, a vision sensor is made, and using this, the 3 dimensional geometry of the bead is measured in real time. For the application in welding, which is the characteristic of nonlinear process, a fuzzy controller is designed. And with this, an adaptive control system is proposed which acquires the bead height and the coordinates of the point on the bead along the horizontal fillet joint, performs seam tracking with those data, and also at the same time, controls the bead geometry to a uniform shape. A communication system, which enables the communication with the industrial robot, is designed to control the bead geometry and to track the weld seam. Experiments are made with varied offset angles from the pre-taught weld path, and they showed the adaptive system works favorable results.