On-line quality inspection in laser blank welding using ART2 neural network

Laser blank welding is becoming more and more important in the automotive industry and the quality of the weld is critical for a successful application.A fully automated solution is required to inspect the quality of the blanks.This paper presents a vision inspection system with a CMOS camera which uses ART2 network to inspect the defects on-line to obtain the geometry and the quality of the weld seam.The neural network ART2 has the capability of self-learning from the environment. It can distinguish the defects that have been learned before and give new outputs for new defects.So ART2 network is suitable for weld quality inspection in laser blank welding.Additionally,a CO2laser is used for the blank butt-welding.