• Proceedings of the KWS Conference
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• 2002.10a
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• pp.314-319
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• 2002

The Automation and Control Group at the University of Brasilia is developing an automatic welding station based on an industrial robot and a controllable welding machine. Several techniques were applied in order to improve the quality of the welding joints. This paper deals with the implementation of a laser-based computer vision system to guide the robotic manipulator during the welding process. Currently the robot is taught to follow a prescribed trajectory which is recorded a repeated over and over relying on the repeatability specification from the robot manufacturer. The objective of the computer vision system is monitoring the actual trajectory followed by the welding torch and to evaluate deviations from the desired trajectory. The position errors then being transfer to a control algorithm in order to actuate the robotic manipulator and cancel the trajectory errors. The computer vision systems consists of a CCD camera attached to the welding torch, a laser emitting diode circuit, a PC computer-based frame grabber card, and a computer vision algorithm. The laser circuit establishes a sharp luminous reference line which images are captured through the video camera. The raw image data is then digitized and stored in the frame grabber card for further processing using specifically written algorithms. These image-processing algorithms give the actual welding path, the relative position between the pieces and the required corrections. Two case studies are considered: the first is the joining of two flat metal pieces; and the second is concerned with joining a cylindrical-shape piece to a flat surface. An implementation of this computer vision system using parallel computer processing is being studied.

• Journal of Welding and Joining
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.99-106
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• 1996

Development of an automatic TIG welding system incorporating a vision sensor and torch control mechanism leads to an improved welding quality and greater production efficiency. The automatic welding system should be greatly restricted in its size and weight for the LNG(Liquefied Natural Gas) storage tank and also provide a unique torch rotating mechanism which keeps the torch tip in the constant position while the angle is changed continuously to maintain the welding torch substantially perpendicular to the weld line. The developed system is driven by two translation axes X, Z and one rotational axis. A moving line window method is adopted to the image recognition of the corrugated membranes with specular reflection. This method decides original laser stripe patterns in image which is affected by multi-reflection. A self-teaching algorithm, which guides the automatic welding machine with the information provided by the CCD camera without any previous learning of a reference trajectory, was developed for tracking the corrugated membrane of the LNG tank along the weld line.

• Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.756-767
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• 2005

This paper presents a decentralized motion control method of welding mobile manipulators which use for welding in many industrial fields. Major requirements of welding robots are accuracy, robust, and reliability so that they can substitute for the welders in hazardous and worse environment. To do this, the manipulator has to take the torch tracking along a welding trajectory with a constant velocity and a constant heading angle, and the mobile-platform has to move to avoid the singularities of the manipulator. In this paper, we develop a kinematic model of the mobile-platform and the manipulator as two separate subsystems. With the idea that the manipulator can avoid the singularities by keeping its initial configuration in the welding process, the redundancy problem of system is solved by introducing the platform mobility to realize this idea. Two controllers for the mobile-platform and the manipulator were designed, respectively, and the relationships between two controllers are the velocities of two subsystems. Control laws are obtained based on the Lyapunov function to ensure the asymptotical stability of the system. The simulation and experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed controllers.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2003.10a
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• pp.191-196
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• 2003

This paper presents a method to design an adaptive controller for the kinematic model of a two-wheeled welding mobile robot (WMR) with unknown parameters. We propose a nonlinear controller based on the Lyapunov function to enhance the tracking properties of the WMR. The WMR can track any smooth curved welding path at a constant velocity of the welding point. The system has three degrees of freedom including two wheels and one torch slider. Torch slider motion is used for fast tracking. To design the tracking performance, the errors from WMR to steel wall is defined, and the controller is designed to drive the errors to zero as fast as possible. The effectiveness of the proposed controller is shown through simulation results.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 2002.07d
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• pp.2497-2499
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• 2002

This raper proposes a simple robust nonlinear controller design method based on Lyapunov stability for tracking reference welding trajectory and velocity of a three wheel welding mobile robot (WMR). Control law is obtained from Lyapunov control function to ensure asymptotical stability of the system. The effectiveness of the proposed controller is shown through simulation results.