• Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology
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• v.17 no.11
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• pp.1682-1692
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• 2003

This paper proposes an adaptive controller for partially known system and applies to a two-wheeled Welding Mobile Robot (WMR) to track a reference welding path at a constant velocity of the welding point. To design the tracking controller, the errors from WMR to steel wall is defined, and the controller is designed to drive the errors to zero as fast as desired. Additionally, a scheme of error measurement is implemented on the WMR to meet the need of the controller. In this paper, the system moments of inertia are considered to be partially unknown parameters which are estimated using update laws in adaptive control scheme. The simulations and experiments on a welding mobile robot show the effectiveness of the proposed controller.

• International Journal of Control, Automation, and Systems
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.35-42
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• 2003

This paper proposes a simple, robust, nonlinear controller based on Lyapunov stability for tracking the reference welding path and velocity of a two-wheeled welding mobile robot (WMR). The system has three degrees of freedom including two wheels and one torch slider. Torch slider motion is used for faster tracking because the welding speed is very slow. Control law is obtained from the Lyapunov control function to ensure the asymptotical stability of the system. The controller has three free parameters for adjusting the performance of the controlled system. A simple way of measuring the errors using two potentiometers is introduced. The effectiveness of the proposed controller is shown through simulation results.

• Proceedings of the KSME Conference
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• 2003.04a
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• pp.786-791
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• 2003

This paper proposes an adaptive control algorithm for nonholonomic mobile robots with unknown parameters and the proposed control method is used in numerical simulations for applying to a practical twowheeled welding mobile robot(WMR). The proposed adaptive controller to track an arbitrary given welding path is designed by using back-stepping technique and is derived for a nonlinear model under the assumption such that the system parameters are partially known. Moreover, the proposed adaptive control system is stable in the sense of Lyapunov stability. Inertia moments of system are considered to be unknown parameters and their values can be estimated simply by using update laws proposed in an adaptive control scheme of this research. The simulation results are provided to show the effectiveness of the accurate tracking capability of the proposed controller for two-wheeled welding mobile robot with a smooth curved reference welding path.

• 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 Korean Society of Marine Engineers Conference
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• 2006.06a
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• pp.85-86
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• 2006

In this paper, a nonlinear controller based on adaptive sliding-mode method which has a sliding surface vector including new boundary function is proposed and applied to a two-wheeled voiding mobile robot (WMR). This controller makes the welding point of WMR achieve tracking a reference point which is moving on a smooth curved welding path with a desired constant velocity. The mobile robot is considered in view of a kinematic model and a dynamic model in Cartesian coordinates. The proposed controller can overcome uncertainties and external disturbances by adaptive sliding-mode technique. To design the controller, the tracking error vector is defined, and then the new sliding is proposed to guarantee that the error vector converges to zero asymptotically. The stability of the dynamic system will be shown through the Lyapunov method. The simulations is shown to prove the effectiveness of the proposed controller.

• International Journal of Control, Automation, and Systems
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• v.5 no.3
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• pp.283-294
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• 2007

In this paper, a nonlinear controller based on adaptive sliding-mode method which has a sliding surface vector including new boundizing function is proposed and applied to a two-wheeled welding mobile robot (WMR). This controller makes the welding point of WMR achieve tracking a reference point which is moving on a smooth curved welding path with a desired constant velocity. The mobile robot is considered in view of a kinematic model and a dynamic model in Cartesian coordinates. The proposed controller can overcome uncertainties and external disturbances by adaptive sliding-mode technique. To design the controller, the tracking error vector is defined, and then the sliding surface vector including new boundizing function and the adaptation laws are chosen to guarantee that the error vector converges to zero asymptotically. The stability of the dynamic system is shown through the Lyapunov method. In addition, a simple way of measuring the errors by potentiometers is introduced. The simulations and experimental results are shown to prove the effectiveness of the proposed controller.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2003.10a
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• pp.1841-1846
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• 2003

The mobile platform-manipulator discussed in this paper is a three link manipulator mounted on a mobile platform. This mobile manipulator is used for welding operation and it is able to operate in a narrow space. The task of the torch, which is mounted at the end effector of the manipulator, is to track along the seam line and the task of the mobile platform is to move the origin point of the manipulator in order to go away from the singularity of the manipulator’s configuration. In this paper, the path planning for the motion of two subsystems (i.e., the manipulator and the mobile platform) was presented by the decentralized control method. Two controllers for the mobile platform and the manipulator were designed, and the relationship between the independent controllers is its state information. The simulation results are also presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the control method.

• 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.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 2002.07d
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• pp.2424-2426
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• 2002

This paper proposes an adaptive control method of partially known system and shows its application result to control for two-wheeled WMR. The controlled system is stable in the sense of Lyapunov stability. To design a tracking controller for welding path reference, an error configuration is defined and the controller is designed to drive the error to zero as fast as desired. Moments of inertia of system are considered to be unknown system parameters. Their values are estimated using update laws in adaptive control scheme. The effectiveness of the proposed controller is shown through simulation results.

• 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.