Welding Gun Inclination Detection and Curved Fillet Weld Joint Tracking

It is important to adjust the welding gun's inclination during automatic curved-joint tracking of arc welding, In this paper, it novel method is proposed to detect the deviation and inclination of the welding gun based on the arc currents acquired by it high-speed rotational arc sensor. It uses it least-squares method to fit the arc currents to a plane in three dimensions. The deviation and inclination of the welding gun are projected to two orthogonal planes so that they can be decoupled and thus can be calculated separately. A mobile welding robotic system was developed, which consists of a differential driving vehicle and a cross-slider manipulator. A fuzzy controller was designed to control the robot wheels and the horizontal slider in the Curved fillet weld tracking. Experiment results show that the detection errors of welding gun inclination and deviation are approximately +/- 7.85 deg and +/- 0.42 mm, respectively.