An Uncalibrated Robotic Weld Tracking System

Abstract

To adapt to the operational conditions with a large workpiece scale and changeable working locations in the field of ship welding, a novel uncalibrated robotic weld seam tracking system is proposed in this paper. Unlike a traditional seam tracking system requiring calibration and extraction of the weld seam feature, we directly utilize the luminance of all pixels in the weld seam image as a visual feature, without a robot hand-eye calibration, image processing, or any learning steps. The experiment results prove that our system is suitable for application to not only for a lap weld seam, but also for different types of weld seams without any changes to the algorithm, except for the corresponding desired image of the weld seams.