Development of Welding Robot for Welding a Rectangular Welding Line

Abstract

In this paper, a welding robot to weld a 3D rectangular welding line (3D-RWL) is designed. A simple controller based on backstepping method is proposed to control the end effector of the welding robot tracking a 3D-RWL with a constant velocity. To obtain the controller, the welding robot is modeled in terms of kinematics model in Cartesian coordinate and the tracking errors are defined. The control system is stable in the sense of Lyapunov stability. In the experimental results, the welding robot is operated by 5 DC motors. So the control system is based on the integration of six PIC 16F877's including one for the master and five for the slaver. The master links to the five slaves via 12C communication. The slaves have a function as the servo DC motors. The effectiveness of the proposed controller is proven through simulation and experimental results.