Development of a Customized Interface for a Robotic Welding Application at Navantia Shipbuilding Company

Abstract

In this paper, a customized interface developed in the framework of the ROBOT FASE II project is described. This project aimed at improving the productivity of two FANUC ARCMate 100iC MIG welding robots with R-30iA controllers mounted in an 8 meters-high mobile gantry crane at Navantia company in Puerto Real, Spain. The solution designed for welding application by the University of Cadiz consists of four parts (1) a library of piece templates including relevant information for each piece to be welded, including obviously the typical piece geometry shape and dimensions, but also all parameters needed for welding(sequence, intensity of the arc, waving description,…) and optimized to get a perfect result by a professional welder team (2) a coordinate measuring arm used to capture 3D information from the real world, (3) a software to generate automatically the optimized FANUC welding program using both the template and the 3D information captured by the arm, adapting the template to real-world coordinates and orientation, (4) and finally an FTP interface to transmit the optimized welding program to each robot for immediate welding operation. The use of this solution for welding operation has reduced robot programming time from hours to minutes for a typical structure allowing an important increase of productivity at Navantia company.