• Journal of Welding and Joining
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.32-37
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• 2009

In shipyard, plate forming is widely used to form the ship hull plate in various shapes. Line heating method by using a flame torch is one of the major shipbuilding processes carried out by skilled workers. Since the forming characteristics depend upon their experiences in manual forming, there are much variations between products and difficulties in communication between engineers and workers. Hence, it needs to develop an automatic forming system which can not only reduce the working time and rework costs but also improve the working environment and hull forming productivity. One of the final goals of plate forming automation is to form a target shape from the initial plate automatically. For automated plate forming, it is required to determine where and how to heat on the plate. To realize this procedure, the inverse problem should be first solved and the effect of curvature shape formed at the heating path should be investigated. In this study, the inverse problem was solved by geometrical approach using the relationship between bending angle and radius of curvature of the curved shape. In addition, experiments of two-dimensional plate forming were performed with the distance-based method considering the curved bending with curvature. The result of the formed shape agreed considerably well with the target shape.

• 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.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.17 no.12
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• pp.446-452
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• 2016

Recently, heat resistant super alloys (which are wear-resistant, corrosion-resistant, and heat-resistant), have been used as the basic structural material in offshore and petrochemical plants. On the other hand, making valves from very expensive, high heat-resistant alloys increases the production cost and decreases its market competitiveness. To solve these problems, the technique of overlaying only those that flow on the fluid has been used as an effective method. Nevertheless, because the former technique of overlaying the ball is performed manually, it takes too much time and perfect welding is difficult to perform. To solve this problem, this study developed a robot automation system that can make uniformly overlay welding of the ball for ball-valves. The system consists of a 6-axis welding robot with a welding torch and additional 2 axes for the rotation of positioner, the controller, and a robot path OLP (Off-Line Programming). The CAD drawing data was entered in the Off-line program to obtain the robot teaching point and drive source. Overlay welding paths were implemented using Matlab. Through an automated overlaying system that implemented the OLP, the productivity rose 2.58 times, as the amount of time required for work decreased from 88 hours to 41 hours.