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

• 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.