Automatic Tracking of Welding Line by Autonomous Mobile Robot for Welding of Plates. Tracking of Linear and Angled Welding Lines.

Abstract

A prototype of an autonomous mobile robot with a vision sensor for automatic welding of thin plates was constructed. The robot has a caster at the front side and two driving wheels at both sides of the vehicle body. The robot can move straight, steer and turn around the robot center by controlling the driving speed of the two wheels. It also has an arm which can change of its extension length. At the end of the movable arm a CCD camera is fixed for observation of the welding line to be tracked. The visual system can detect the welding line position precisely and recognize the type of line, such as straight, curved or angled line, using several octagonal scanning lines. In this study, a control system to automatically track a straight welding line and an angled one by controlling the movement of the robot body and the arm was constructed, and the validity of the robot control system for automatic seam tracking was confirmed by tracking experiments.