Passive vision based seam tracking system for pulse-MAG welding

Welding robots have been widely used in manufacturing process to substitute for human welders. However, most of them are rigid and cannot adjust to variations in the weld seam positions caused by natural welding environmental factors. To address this problem, this paper presents a passive vision-based robotic welding system, which can realize the seam tracking function for pulse-MAG welding. In this paper, the light spectrum of the welding process is analyzed to determine the optical filters used during the image capture. Then, a robust image processing method is proposed to extract the offset from the image which contains much noise. The transformation formula is calibrated to obtain the relationship between the image coordinate system and the robot coordinate system. The tracking strategy is designed to improve the tracking precision and the stability of the welding process. Finally, experiments are conducted on straight line and curved line seam to verify the feasibility of the developed system.