A FEATURE-BASED MODELING OF A WELDED PLATE CONSTRUCTION

This paper addresses an approach to a feature based modeling of a welded plate construction that can support process planning of robotic arc welding and CAD based off-line robot programming. Most solid modelers are often incapable of providing enough information for CAD/CAM integration. A feature based modeling is a promising approach to support an effective product modeling for the integration. Although arc welding is an important robot application, the approach has rarely been used in this area. Features for robot arc welding are identified and classified. A process of designing welded plate construction based on the features is suggested. A prototype system is developed to implement the proposed approach, and an application example is shown to describe the system. Since the feature based approach provides weldline and feature data from a product database, it can facilitate process planning of robotic arc welding, such as positioner and robot motion planning, welding scheduling, and welding sequence generation.