Abstract
Mobile Manipulators (MM) has attracted a lot of researchers for incorporation in the robotics field owning to their multitude of applications in real world. Welding automation has its wide applications in industry like automobile manufacturing and power generation industry involving spherical tanks. The objective of this study is to design workspace and devise a methodology to plan position trajectory of welding tool that produces smooth welding while the mobile platform turns simultaneously. The robot proposed in this paper has the manipulator mounted on a platform moving as a turntable to increase the workspace and enhances the mobility of the manipulator. The earlier produces linear segment of weld while the later produces parabolic segment. The kinematic equations for mobile platform and the mounted manipulator are described in detail. The workspace of the robot is visualized based on computations of transformation matrices and jacobians structured based on kinematic equation. Trajectories for each joint, computed using inverse kinematic equations, are also presented. For spherical trajectories the solution of system equations is combined with constraint values for each manipulator joint, thus allowing computation of desired joint position at any time interval. The efficacy of the proposed methodology for the trajectory planning is tested through a case study. The simulation results of motion transformation, workspace and trajectory show that linear segments of the trajectory combine with parabolic trajectory segments smoothly with zero acceleration within designed reachable workspace. The experimental results verify the efficacy of application of presented kinematic and inverse kinematic models for welding of spherical objects.
Highlights
Since last few years welding manipulators are being extensively studied by the researchers [1]–[10]
Research is mainly focused on the design and control systems for welding
Recent development in robotics field has led to automatic welding operations
Summary
Since last few years welding manipulators are being extensively studied by the researchers [1]–[10]. Research is mainly focused on the design and control systems for welding. The need for mobile robotic welding has increased in today’s industrial environments. Most of the welding process is conducted manually and there is shortage of expertise in seam welding on spherical objects. In order to improve quality of weld seam and to overcome shortage of expertise in welding of spherical tanks, automatic welding equipment is needed. Recent development in robotics field has led to automatic welding operations. One of these emerging trends is the mobile welding. In this paper we propose a mobile manipulator that is capable
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