Weld line detection and process control for welding automation

Abstract

Welding has been widely used as a process to join metallic parts. But because of hazardous working conditions, workers tend to avoid this task. Techniques to achieve the automation are the recognition of joint line and process control. A CCD (charge coupled device) camera with a laser stripe was applied to enhance the automatic weld seam tracking in GMAW (gas metal arc welding). The adaptive Hough transformation having an on-line processing ability was used to extract laser stripes and to obtain specific weld points. The three-dimensional information obtained from the vision system made it possible to generate the weld torch path and to obtain information such as the width and depth of the weld line. In this study, a neural network based on the generalized delta rule algorithm was adapted to control the process of GMAW, such as welding speed, arc voltage and wire feeding speed. The width and depth of the weld joint have been selected as neurons in the input layer of the neural-network algorithm. The input variables, the width and depth of the weld joint, are determined by image information. The voltage, weld speed and wire feed rate are represented as the neurons in the output layer. The results of the neural-network learning applied to the welding are as follows: learning ratio 0.5, momentum ratio 0.7, the number of hidden layers 2 and the number of hidden units 8. They have significant influence on the weld quality.