Welding Robots - Technology, System Issues and Applications
Author: J. Norberto Pires, Altino Loureiro and Gunnar Bölmsjo | Size: 2.44 MB | Format: PDF | Quality: Original preprint | Publisher: Springer-Verlag | Year: 2006 | pages: 192 | ISBN: 1-85233-953-5/978-1-85233-953-1
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Industrial robots are essential components of today’s factory and even more of the factory of the future. The demand for the use of robots stems from the potential for flexible, intelligent machines that can perform tasks in a repetitive manner at acceptable cost and quality levels. The most active industry in the application of robots is the automobile industry and there is great interest in applying robots to weld and assembly operations, and material handling.
For the sake of competitiveness in modern industries, manual welding must be limited to shorter periods of time because of the required setup time, operator discomfort, safety considerations and cost. Thus, robotic welding is critical to welding automation in many industries. It is estimated as much as 25% of all industrial robots are being used for welding tasks.
Robotic welding is being initiated to satisfy a perceived need for high-quality welds in shorter cycle times. The first generation of robotic welding system was a two-pass weld system, where the first pass is dedicated to learning the seam geometry followed by the actual tracking and welding in the second pass. The second generation of welding systems, on the other hand, track the seam in realtime, performing simultaneously the learning and the seam tracking phases. The third generation of welding systems not only operates in real-time but also learns the rapid changing in seam geometries while operating within unstructured environments. Flexibility was achieved with this third generation of welding systems but at the expenses of a considerable amount of programming work of high skilled people in system’s integration directed to specific applications.
However, availability and agility are additional key issues in modern manufacturing industries, demanding new welding systems incorporating these features as well, revealing in this way the flexibility of the system to the normal operator without the need of extra skills from him.
This book covers up-to-date and relevant work in the area of third generation of robotic welding systems with availability and agility features. The principalwelding processes are reviewed from the point of view of their automation. A distributed system’s approach is followed for the integration of the different components and software of the welding cell and its integration within the global production system. Particular emphasis is given to the availability and agility to the end user. Application examples demonstrating step-by-step the system’s integration design clarify the relevant aspects to the interested reader.
The authors have made a strong-minded effort to set their work in the context of international robotic arc welding research. The mix of specific research issues and the review of broader research approaches make this a particularly welcome contribution.
This book is directed towards readers who are interested in developing robotic welding applications, and in particular to perform system integration. Although this work is presented in the context of arc welding, the issues related to system integration are general in nature and apply to other robotic applications as well.
This book constitutes a valuable source of the kind of information on robotic welding that result of years of experience, making it suitable as well for the decision maker, the application engineer, the researcher, the technician, and the student.
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Preface
Modern manufacturing faces two main challenges: more quality at lower prices and the need to improve productivity. Those are the requirements to keep manufacturing plants in developed countries, facing competition from the low salary regions of the world. Other very important characteristics of the manufacturing systems are flexibility and agility of the manufacturing process,
since companies need to respond to a very dynamic market with products exhibiting very short life-cycles due to fashion tendencies and worldwide competition. Consequently, manufacturing companies need to respond to market requirements efficiently, keeping their products competitive. This requires a very efficient and controlled manufacturing process, where focus is on automation, computers and software. The final objective is to achieve semi-autonomous systems, i.e., highly automated systems that work requiring only minor operator intervention.
Robotic welding is one of the most successful applications of industrial robot manipulators. In fact, a huge number of products require welding operations in their assembly processes. Despite all the interest, industrial robotic welding evolved only slightly and is far from being a solved technological process, at least in a general way. The welding process is complex, difficult to parameterize and to monitor and control effectively. In fact, most of the welding techniques are not fully understood, namely the effects on the welding joints, and are used based on empirical models obtained by experience under specific conditions. The effects of the welding process on the welded surfaces are currently not fully known. Welding can in most cases impose extremely high temperatures concentrated in small zones.
Physically, that makes the material experience extremely high and localized thermal expansion and contraction cycles, which introduce changes in the materials that may affect its mechanical behavior along with plastic deformation. Those changes must be well understood in order to minimize the effects. The majority of industrial welding applications benefit from the introduction of
robot manipulators, since most of the deficiencies attributed to the human factor is removed with advantages when robots are introduced. This should lead to cheaper products since productivity and quality can be increased, and production costs and manpower can be decreased. Nevertheless, when a robot is added to a welding setup the problems increase in number and in complexity. Robots are still difficult to use and program by regular operators, have limited remote facilities and programming environments, and are controlled using closed systems and limited
software interfaces.
The present book gives a detailed overview of Robotic Welding at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The evolution of robotic welding is presented, showing to the reader what were the biggest steps and developments observed in the last few years. This is presented with the objective of establishing the current state-of-theart in terms of technologies, welding systems, software and sensors. The remaining issues, i.e., the issues that remain open are stated clearly, as a way to motivate the readers to follow the rest of the book which will make contributions to clarify most
of them and help to solve a few.
To do that, a good chapter on “Welding Technology” is presented, describing the most important welding techniques and their potential and requirements for automation using robot manipulators. This chapter includes recent results on robotic welding processes, which can constitute a good source of information and practical examples for readers.
A good revision with current research results on “Sensors for Welding Robots” used on robotic welding is also presented. This includes sensors for seam tracking, quality control and supervision. This chapter includes all system requirements necessary to use those sensors and sensing techniques with actual robot control systems. Hardware and software interfaces are also covered in detail.
A good revision on available welding systems, including hardware and software, clarifying their advantages, and drawbacks is also necessary to give to the reader a clear picture of the area. The book includes a chapter on “Welding Robots: System Issues”, which covers recent state-of-the-art of industrial robotic welding systems currently available in industry and university laboratories.
Finally, a few industrial applications using the presented techniques and systems is presented. The present book includes a chapter on “Robotic Welding: Application Examples”, where a few selected applications are described in detail including aspects related to software, hardware, system integration and industrial exploitation. This chapter uses actual robots, but it is presented in a general way so that the interested reader can easily explore his interests.
Conclusions stating what was presented and what are the next challenges, guiding the reader to what are the next required developments, is presented at the end of the book. A good collection of references is also presented, to enable the reader to explore further from the literature.
J. Norberto Pires, Coimbra, 2005
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