Intelligent wheeled mobile robot for spherical tank welding

Junbo Wang; Zhenguo Sun; Meng Ji; Qiang Chen; Lipei Jiang; Xiangdong Jiao; Long Xue

doi:10.1117/12.457449

18 February 2002 Intelligent wheeled mobile robot for spherical tank welding

Junbo Wang, Zhenguo Sun, Meng Ji, Qiang Chen, Lipei Jiang, Xiangdong Jiao, Long Xue

Proceedings Volume 4573, Mobile Robots XVI; (2002) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.457449
Event: Intelligent Systems and Advanced Manufacturing, 2001, Boston, MA, United States

Abstract

At present, spherical tank manufacture is still staying at the level of manual welding or semi-automation. In order to improve quality of weld seam and guarantee safe operating of spherical tank, automatic welding equipment is needed urgently. A intelligent wheeled mobile robot equipped with CCD based visual sensor has been developed to acquire better weld quality in this research. Special mechanical structure has been proposed based a wheeled mobile robot body to realize reliably and flexibly absorbing and moving on the surface of spherical tank. A 3-DOF welding manipulator has been fixed on the robot to carry out welding tasks. A CCD sensor has been used to detect weld seam for the trajectory planing of both the mobile robot and the welding torch, control strategy for nonholonomic system with redundant DOF has been put forward to realize the accurate tracing of weld torch, an intelligent controller has been designed. In this paper, mechanical structure of robot, principle of CCD sensor, tracing model for robot and welding torch, and intelligent controller have been presented in details respectively. Experiments show that this robot can fulfill all-position welding tasks freely on the surface of tank with high weld torch tracing accuracy(up to +/- 0.5mm).

Citation Download Citation

Junbo Wang, Zhenguo Sun, Meng Ji, Qiang Chen, Lipei Jiang, Xiangdong Jiao, and Long Xue "Intelligent wheeled mobile robot for spherical tank welding", Proc. SPIE 4573, Mobile Robots XVI, (18 February 2002); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.457449

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