Emulating manual welding process by two cooperative robots

Abstract

The problem of how to emulate a manual welding process by two cooperative robotic manipulators is investigated in this paper. The emulating process is intrinsically a trajectory planning process for the two cooperative robots. Experience of skilled welders and technical requirements in a welding process have been modeled and integrated into the robot trajectory planning model. Mathematic model of trajectory planing for two cooperative robots doing a welding task is in a constrained optimization form. A Genetic Algorithm solver has been adopted to solve such an optimization problem. Pipe-connect-pipe welding experiment has been carried out at the end of the paper and the weld results verified the effectiveness of our method.