Robotic welding system for sub-assembly line in ship manufacturing

로봇을 이용한 조선 소조립 용접 자동화 시스템

Sub-assembly in ship manufacturing is a sequence of filet joint welding of stiffeners on metal panels and the process is different depending on companies. In this paper, we introduce a new intelligent robotic system of the sub-assembly process in Samsung Heavy Industry, where one shift of 22m * 9m workspace includes one to ten panels and each panel includes up to 10 stiffeners. The inherent problems such as several hundreds of different panels, unstructured task environment and the large scale do not allow a fixed automation, but needs highly intelligent versatile automation. The robotic system is composed of four 14DOF macro-mini robots and a task recognition system. Application of this system has verified the task specification such as low temperature environment(-10.deg. C) and productivity is satisfied successfully.