• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 1997.04a
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• pp.729-733
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• 1997

Due to the variety of disturbance, it is not ease to accomplish the in-process detection of weld line with non-contact sensor. To get around this difficulties problem develop an automatic seam tracking weld system, the reliable signal processing algorithm has been recommanded. In this research, laser displacement sensor is applied as a seam finder in the automatic tracking system. The sensor is controlled by a dc servo motor which is mounted at X-Y moving table. X-Y moving table manipulated by an ac servo motor controls the position and velocity of the welding torch. First, X-Y table moves to Y-axis to search the welding joint feature before starting the welding, and welding joint is from the scanning data and weighting factor for each other. Second, weld line is determined using proposed signal processing algorithm during welding process. Form the experimental results, we could see the possibility that laser displacement sensor with procesed algorithm can be used as a seam finder in welding process under the severe noise (spatter,arc light etc.) condition

• Journal of Welding and Joining
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.70-75
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• 2000

The weld seam tracking system for arc welding process uses various kinds of sensors such as arc sensor, vision sensor, laser displacement and so on. Among the variety of sensors available, electro-magnetic sensor is one of the most useful methods especially in sheet metal butt-joint arc welding, primarily because it is hardly affected by the intense arc light and fume generated during the welding process, and also by the surface condition of weldments. In this study, a dual-electromagnetic sensor, which utilizes the induced current variation in the sensing coil due to the eddy current variation of the metal near the sensor, was developed for arc welding of sheet metal butt-joints. The dual-electromagnetic sensor thus detects the offset displacement of weld line from the center of sensor head even though there's no clearance in the joint. A set of design variables of the sensor were determined for the maximum sensing capability through the repeated experiments. Seam tracking is performed by correcting the position of sensor to the amount of offset displacement every sampling period. From the experimental results, the developed sensor showed the excellent capability of weld seam detection when the sensor to workpiece distance is near less than 5 mm, and it was revealed that the system has excellent seam tracking ability for the butt-joint of sheet metal.

• Journal of Welding and Joining
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.122-131
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• 1995

An automatic welding equipment for thick plates requires the capability of the seam tracking of the weld line which often includes misalignment of the workpiece and variation of groove width. In this study, an automatic welding equipment and control algorithms based on the arc sensor were proposed for the GMA welding of thick plates which had misalignment and gap variation. The developed system being constituted with 5 axis can be automatically controlled by computer and also automnatically set the welding conditions such as welding current, and voltage. The proposed algorithms for the seam tracking in multi-pass welding of the thick plates were constituted as follows : the detection of weaving-end point for findng the variation of groove width, the control of welding velocity for acquiring a constant thickness deposition of weld metal, and the calculation of groove width and height of an arbitrary pass in the multi-pass weld. As results of the application of the system, it was revealed that the system had a good capability in seam tracking and made an excellent weld quality in V groove butt joint.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 1996.10b
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• pp.775-778
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• 1996

In this research, the robustness of a seam tracking for the automatic welding system is studied. The laser displacement sensor is used as a seam finder. X-Y moving table drived by ac servo motor controls the position and velocity of the torch-and-sensor part. However, dc servo motor is used to control the position and velocity of the torch. The sensor locates ahead of torch to preview the weld line, and brings about the inaccuracy on the torch tracking. To enhance the robustness on this system against the influence of disturbances and model uncertainty, H$\_$.inf./ control is applied to the angular motion of torch. The simulation shows that the tracking accuracy improved significantly. Also, experimental results give a good performance of H$\_$.inf./ control strategy to the automatic seam tracking system for the welding.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Marine Engineers Conference
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• 2006.06a
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• pp.167-168
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• 2006

This paper is concerned about the development system that the bead width's size can be controlled. In order to control the bead width, DC motor driving slide on auto carriage is used. The adjustment of bead width is carried by amplitude and weaving shape is controlled by MCU(Micro Controller Unit). We confirmed the result by tracking experiments.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 1995.10a
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• pp.1105-1109
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• 1995

A CCD-camera, which is structured with vision system, was used to realize automatic seam-tracking system and 3-D information which is needed to generate torch path, was obtained by using laser-slip beam. To extract laser strip and obtain welding-specific point, Adaptive Hough-transformation was used. Although the basic Hough transformation takes too much time to process image on line, it has a tendency to be robust to the noises as like spatter. For that reson, it was complemented with Adaptive Hough transformation to have an on-line processing ability for scanning a welding-specific point. the dead zone,where the sensing of weld line is impossible, is eliminated by rotating the camera with its rotating axis centered at welding torch. The camera angle is controlled so as to get the minimum image data for the sensing of weld line, hence the image processing time is reduced. The fuzzy controller is adapted to control the camera angle.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 1996.04a
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• pp.680-684
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• 1996

Welding systems cannot adapt to changes in the joint geometry which may occur due to a variety of reason. Automatic seam tracking technigue is essential to adjust the welding torch position in real time as it moves along the seam. Automatic tracking system must keep the welding speed constant unrelation to the change of the welding path. Therefore, the information from the laser displacement sensor must be converted into the input to operate the X-Y table and to rotate the desired torch position by proposed algorithm. In this research, laser displacement sensor is used as a seam finder in the automatic tracking system. X-Y moving table manipulated by ac servo motor controls the position and velocity of the torch-and-sensor part. DC motor controls the position and velocity of the torch. X-Y table controls the position of sensor and relative position of torch is controlled by dc motor which is mounted at sensor-and-torch part. Sensor is always ahead of torch to preview the weld line. From the experimental results, we could see the possiblity that the laser displacement sensor can be used as a seam finder in welding process and that the seam tracking system controlled by proposed algorithm is well done.

• Journal of Welding and Joining
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.66-72
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• 2005

An electromagnetic inductive sensor consisted of one exciter and three separated (triple) detectors has been developed for both tracking the weld seam of a workpiece and controlling the sensor-to-workpiece distance (height) simultaneously. The left and right detectors are used to track the seam, while the fore and the other two detectors allow the sensor to determine the height and the gap width by being coupled their outputs together. A series of experiments with the proposed sensor located above a mild steel plate containing a weld seam of gap are carried out to examine the feasibility of the sensor. The results revealed that the proposed sensor could fairly well track the desired seam and also well control the height to be constant even when the gap width of the seam varied. The gap width can be also determined during the seam tracking by using the sensor outputs. As a consequence, these can provide the developed sensor with substantial improvement for industrial uses with respect to the previous electromagnetic sensors being used for the weld seam tracking.