Kinematic Control of A Robot-Positioner System for Arc Welding Application

Abstract

Resent advances in arc welding technology motivate rethinking of some postulates and conventions incorporated in the existing robot control methods. This chapter addresses relaxing of the downhand-position assumption, which became a de-facto standard in robotic welding and requires the weld normal vector to be opposite to gravity. In contrast to the standard techniques, the developed method explicitly assumes that a weld may be processed in the non-downhand location, within given tolerances. But, to ensure the prescribed quality, the downhand deviation is charged by reduction of the welding speed. For such settings, it is proposed a novel method for the kinematic control of a robot-positioner system and related optimisation algorithm for the clusterlevel planning of the welding operations. By using this technique in combination with the existing CAD tools, it is possible essentially reduce the cycle time of the robotic welding station.