A novel dual-channel weld seam tracking system for aircraft T-joint welds

Abstract

Laser welding technology for skin-stringer joints is widely used in aircraft manufacturing. Double-sided laser beam welding of skin-stringer joints is an approved method for producing defect-free welds. The main drawback for the use of single-sided welding method for T-joints is the occurrence of weld defects. To achieve dual-beam laser-welded T-joint, a dual-beam laser welding platform based on multi-axis CNC machine is set up in this paper. A novel control method of double-sided seam tracking and error compensation based on vision sensor is proposed. The weld seams on both sides of the T-joint are detected simultaneously by two vision sensors. At the same time, the welding deviation on both sides of the T-joint are compensated at real time by an independent error compensation control method based on self-adaptive fuzzy-PID controller. The result shows that the dual-beam laser welding system can achieve high precision dynamic deviation compensation in the double-sided welding process at a high speed.