• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.32 no.3
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• pp.243-251
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• 2015

In order to develop an automatic system for welding thin steel plates with curvature such as the corrugated membranes of an LNG storage tank, a rotating mechanism should be firstly designed for the torch to easily follow the weld seam with a constant distance and angle. In this study, a torch rotating mechanism consisting of three circular links, two square-type links and a torch link was proposed for automation of the welding process. A weld-seam tracking system with two axis slides and the proposed rotating mechanism was successfully simulated with a dynamic simulation software. A prototype tracking system was manufactured and a tracking test with the system was then carried out. The test results with tracking system showed that the rotating mechanism could be implemented and it was feasible to be used in automatic tracking of weld seam with curvature.

• International Journal of Korean Welding Society
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.51-56
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• 2002

The weld seam tracking system for arc welding process uses various kinds of sensors such as arc sensor, vision sensor, laser displacement sensor 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 I-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 was determined far 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 ㎜, and it was revealed that the system has excellent seam tracking ability for the I-butt joint of sheet metal.

• Special Issue of the Society of Naval Architects of Korea
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• 2013.12a
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• pp.73-80
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• 2013

From broad point of view, seam tracking has been one of main issues with respect to welding automation. Several attempts have been successful for seam tracking of fixed weaving width. As a solution of the seam tracking methods for varying groove width, the visual sensors such as CCD cameras have been adopted. Although the vision sensing techniques can achieve high accuracy, the weak point is that well-prepared vision sensor environment should be required to obtain high-quality visual measurements which can be easily affected by significant noises in industrial areas. This paper proposed an alternative seam tracking algorithm for narrow groove. A special measurement device for arc voltage, in this study, is developed to enhance the reliability of the measured welding signals. Based on the developed arc sensor algorithm, an automatic weld-width tracking algorithm is also proposed, which is able to predict the weld-position more accurately. The usefulness of the automatic weld-width tracking algorithm was well verified by applying it to gas tungsten arc welding (GTAW).

• International Journal of Korean Welding Society
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.30-37
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• 2004

There have been continuous efforts on automating 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, a vision system is constructed and using this, the 3 dimensional geometry of the bead is measured on-line. For the application as 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.

• Journal of Welding and Joining
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.156-166
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• 1995

Experimental models which are able to determine the deviation between weld line and weaving center by measuring the weld current during welding were proposed for the gas metal arc welding process. The models were used for developing a weld seam tracking system which controls the weaving speed of a welding torch. However, it was revealed that the tracking result of the system is affected by the welding conditions. Thus an arc sensor system was developed by using fuzzy control approach for overcoming the difficulty of modelling the nonlinear process. The rule base and parameters of the fuzzy control system were determined on the basis of the results of experiments. This fuzzy control system has shown the successful tracking capability for the wide operating range of welding conditions.

• 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.3
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• pp.55-63
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• 1998

Among the position sensing methods available, the arc sensor which utilizes the electrical signal obtained from the welding arc itself is one of the most prevalently used methods, because it has an advantage that no particular sensing device is necessary and real-time sensing of a groove position is possible directly under the arc. The authors have already developed a seam tracking system that contains a new arc sensor algorithm, which uses the relative welding current variation according to the tip-to-workpiece distance in GMA welding. In this study a torch height control algorithm for automatic weld seam tracking was proposed for completing the previous system, which uses an on-off control technique. To implement the torch height control algorithm during weld seam tracking the system parameters which include 2nd averaging range, weighting factor for 2nd moving averaging, and Z-directional basic compensation distance were determined by experimental analysis. Finally the two different height control methods, one is simple on-off control and the other on-off control using a reference current value , were compared in their tracking abilities.

• 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.21 no.1
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• pp.60-65
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• 2003

At present. welding of most pipes with large diameter is carried out by the manual process. Automation of the welding process is necessary f3r the sake of consistent weld quality and improvement in productivity. In this study, two vision sensors, based on the optical triangulation, were used to obtain the information for seam tracking and detecting the weld defects. Through utilization of the vision sensors, noises were removed, images and 3D information obtained and positions of the feature points detected. The aforementioned process provided the seam and leg position data, calculated the magnitude of the gap, fillet area and leg length and judged the weld defects by ISO 5817. Noises in the images were removed by using the gradient values of the laser stripe's coordinates and various feature points were detected by using an algorithm based on the iterative polygon approximation method. Since the process time is very important, all the aforementioned processes should be conducted during welding.

• Journal of Welding and Joining
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• v.16 no.6
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• pp.68-76
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• 1998

A CCD camera with a laser stripe was applied to realized the automatic weld seam tracking. The 3-dimensional information obtained from the vision system made it possible to generate the weld torch path. The adaptive Hough transformation was used to extract laser stripes an to obtain specific weld points. It takes relatively long time to process image on-line control using the basic control using the basic Hough transformation, but it has a tendency of robustness over the noises such as spatter. For this reason, it was complemented with adaptive Hough transformation to have an on-line processing ability for scanning specific weld points. The dead zone, where the sensing of weld line is impossible, was eliminated by rotating the camera with its rotating axis centered at the weld torch. When weld lines were detected, the camera angle was controlled in order to get the minimum image data for sensing of weld lines. Consequently, the image processing time was reduced.