Recognition of macroscopic seam for complex robotic welding environment

Abstract

In vision-based robotic arc welding had some degree of autonomy functions, sensors must be used to detect the position and orientation of a weld seam and determine its path in order to carry out the autonomy of welding process. This paper represented a method to recognize whole seam in complex robotic welding environment. According to the parameter we defined to judge the degree of image noise, then different size of filter windows were selected to preprocess the image. Algorithm to eliminate effect of complex changing background is proposed. Parameters are defined to judge if it is necessary to use this algorithm. The threshold and edge detect algorithms that adapt to the recognition for robotic welding environment is also addressed in this paper. The experiments give the recognition results of two different shapes and material of seams. The results showed that the recognized method was robust to the recognition of macroscopic seam for complex robotic welding environment. © 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.