Study on weld seam geometry control for connected gas metal arc welding systems*

Abstract

In this study, a robot welding application for the control of the weld seam geometry by means of in situ image acquisition and robot trajectory correction has been investigated. For this approach, the arc centroid position of the process images was correlated with the weld seam flank ratio of the examined fillet weld seam application. The correction was performed along a selected trajectory plane without violating the welding process stability. In addition, the system as a sum of its partial competences with their different synchronization requirements and corresponding bottlenecks was illuminated. Optimization suggestions arose especially in advanced control engineering as well as in-kernel processing and in-network computing. In summary, it can be stated that, on the one hand, the examined relationship between arc centroid and flank ratio is subject to interference and that image processing in particular has potential for optimization.