• Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.83-93
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• 2002

This paper presents a motion control method and its simulation results of a mobile robot for a lattice type welding. Its dynamic equation and motion control methods for welding speed and seam tracking are described. The motion control is realized in the view of keeping constant welding speed and precise target line even though the robot is driven for following straight line or curve. The mobile robot is modeled based on Lagrange equation under nonholonomic constraints and the model is represented in state space form. The motion control of the mobile robot is separated into three driving motions of straight locomotion, turning locomotion and torch slider control. For the torch slider control, the proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control method is used. For the straight locomotion, a concept of decoupling method between input and output is adopted and for the turning locomotion, the turning speed is controlled according to the angular velocity value at each point of the corner with range of 90$^{\circ}$ constrained to the welding speed. The proposed control methods are proved through simulation results and these results have proved that the mobile robot has enough ability to apply the lattice type welding line.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2006.05a
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• pp.285-286
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• 2006

The essential tasks to operate the welding robot are the acquisition of the position and/or shape of the parent metal. For the seam tracking or the robot automation, many kinds of contact and non-contact sensors are used. Recently, the vision sensor is most popular. In this paper, the development of the system which measures the profile of the welding part is described. The total system will be assembled into a compact module which can be attached to the head of welding robot system. This system uses the line-type structured laser diode and the vision sensor It implemented Direct Linear Transformation (DLT) for the camera calibration as well as radial distortion correction. The three dimensional shape of the parent metal is obtained after simple linear transformation and therefore, the system operates in real time. Some experiments are carried out to evaluate the performance of the developed system.

• Proceedings of the KWS Conference
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• 2005.11a
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• pp.144-146
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• 2005

Dual electromagnetic sensor is used for sensing the weld line. The sensor consists of excitation and two sensing coil wound over the ferro-magnetic core. By using the dual sensor, the effect of noise is minimized. It is based on the generation of eddy currents in the welding plate by passing current through the excitation coil. The sensor can be used to track the butt joints having no gap between them, where a vision based sensor fails to track. Sensor sensitivity depends on the number of coil turns, frequency of excitation, distance of a sensor from the work piece, diameter of core, etc. The whole system consists of a sensor, a signal processing board, a motion controller and a personnel computer (PC). The raw sensor signal is processed using the signal processing board. It consists of amplification, rectification, filtering, averaging, offset adjustment, etc. Based on sensor data, the motion controller adjusts the position of a welding torch.

• Proceedings of the KSME Conference
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• 2001.06b
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• pp.319-324
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• 2001

This paper presents the motion control of a mobile robot with arc sensor for lattice type welding. Its dynamic equation and motion control method for welding speed and seam tracking are described. The motion control is realized in the view of keeping constant welding speed and precise target line even though the robot is driven along a straight line or corner. The mobile robot is modeled based on Lagrange equation under nonholonomic constraints and the model is represented in state space form. The motion control of the mobile robot is separated into three driving motions of straight locomotion, turning locomotion and torch slider controls. For the torch slider control, the proportional integral derivative (PID) control method is used. For the straight locomotion, a concept of decoupling method between input and output is adopted and for the turning locomotion, the turning speed is controlled according to the angular velocity value at each point of the comer with range of $90^{\circ}$ constrained to the welding speed. The experiment has been done to verify the effectiveness of the proposed controllers. These results are shown to fit well by the simulation results.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.218-222
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• 2014

In this paper, we introduce an autonomous calibration method for a 2D laser displacement sensor (e.g. laser vision sensor and laser range finder) by matching a single point on a flat structure. Many arc welding robots install a 2D laser displacement sensor to expand their application by recognizing their environment (e.g. base metal and seam). In such systems, sensing data should be transformed to the robot's coordinates, and the geometric relation (i.e. rotation and translation) between the robot's coordinates and sensor coordinates should be known for the transformation. Calibration means the inference process of geometric relation between the sensor and robot. Generally, the matching of more than 3 points is required to infer the geometric relation. However, we introduce a novel method to calibrate using only 1 point matching and use a specific flat structure (i.e. circular hole) which enables us to find the geometric relation with a single point matching. We make the rotation component of the calibration results as a constant to use only a single point by moving a robot to a specific pose. The flat structure can be installed easily in a manufacturing site, because the structure does not have a volume (i.e. almost 2D structure). The calibration process is fully autonomous and does not need any manual operation. A robot which installed the sensor moves to the specific pose by sensing features of the circular hole such as length of chord and center position of the chord. We show the precision of the proposed method by performing repetitive experiments in various situations. Furthermore, we applied the result of the proposed method to sensor based seam tracking with a robot, and report the difference of the robot's TCP (Tool Center Point) trajectory. This experiment shows that the proposed method ensures precision.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.8 no.9
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• pp.776-787
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• 2002

Automation of welding process in shipyards is ultimately necessary, since the welding site is spatially enclosed by floors and girders, and therefore welding operators are exposed to hostile working conditions. To solve this problem, a welding mobile robot that can navigate autonomously within the enclosure has been developed. To achieve the welding task in the closed space, the robotic welding system needs a sensor system for the working environment recognition and the weld seam tracking, and a specially designed environment recognition strategy. In this paper, a three-dimensional laser vision system is developed based on the optical triangulation technology in order to provide robots with 3D work environmental map. Using this sensor system, a spatial filter based on neural network technology is designed for extracting the center of laser stripe, and evaluated in various situations. An environment modeling algorithm structure is proposed and tested, which is composed of the laser scanning module for 3D voxel modeling and the plane reconstruction module for mobile robot localization. Finally, an environmental recognition strategy for welding mobile robot is developed in order to recognize the work environments efficiently. The design of the sensor system, the algorithm for sensing the partially structured environment with plane segments, and the recognition strategy and tactics for sensing the work environment are described and discussed with a series of experiments in detail.

• Proceedings of the KWS Conference
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• 2002.10a
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• pp.320-323
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• 2002

This paper presents a new generation of system for pressure vessel and shipbuilding. Typical pressure vessel and ship building weld joint preparations are either traditional V, butt, fillet grooves or have narrow or semi narrow gap profiles. The fillet and U groove are prevalently used in heavy industries and shipbuilding to melt and join the parts. 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 processes such as SAW(Submerged Arc Welding) and FCAW(Flux Cored Arc Welding) can be many hours. Although SAW and FCAW are normally a mechanized process, pressure vessel and ship structures welding up to now have usually been controlled by a full time operator. The operator has typically been responsible for positioning each individual weld run, for setting weld process parameters, for maintaining flux and wire levels, for removing slag and so on. The aim of the system is to develop a high speed welding system with multitorch 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. To achieve this, a laser vision sensor, a rotating torch and an image processing algorithm have been made. Also, the multitorch welding system can be applicable for the fine grained steel because of the high welding speed and lower heat input compare to a conventional welding process.