A new teaching system for arc welding robots with auxiliary path point generation module

Abstract

Arc welding robots are widely used in factories. Most robots require highly-skilled workers doing time-consuming and tedious programming work. The proposed new teaching system in this paper is aiming to simplify the programming process by adding a path point generation module, which depends on a RGB-D sensor to obtain the point cloud and generate path points for space curve seam. The advantage of this system is simplifying the teaching process, which is a step forward of realizing task-level programming. The system is used on an ordinary arc welding robot while not changing it, working as a plug-and-play type solution for easy programming. In this paper, the structure of this teaching system is described. Software architecture of important modules in the system is presented in details. An example is showed that how this system is working.