• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
• /
• v.49 no.9
• /
• pp.307-313
• /
• 2012

This paper proposes a hand-eye laser range finder (LRF) based welding plane recognition method for autonomous robotic welding. The robot welding is the process of joining a metal piece and the welding plane along the welding path predefined by the shape of the metal piece. Thus, for successful robotic welding, the position and direction of the welding plane should be exactly detected. If the detected position and direction of the plane is not accurate, the autonomous robotic welding should fail. For precise recognition of the welding plane, a line on the plane is detected by the LRF. For obtaining the line on the plane, the Hough transform is applied to the obtained data from the LRF. Since the Hough transform is based on the voting method, the sensor noise can be reduced. Two lines on the plane are obtained before and after rotation of the robot joint, and then the direction of the plane is calculated by the cross product of two direction vectors of two lines. For verifying the feasibility of the proposed method, the simulation with the robot simulator, RoboticsLab developed by Simlab Co. Ltd., is carried out.