Investigation On Visual Seam Tracking System Based On Laser Structured Light

The combination of vision sensor technology and robots using in welding technology is amajor breakthrough in the filed of industrial production,and also the basis for achievingintelligent welding.Harsh welding environment and high consumption of physical strenghthmake it imperative to achieve welding automation.With the rapid development of visualsensing technology, visual seam tracking system stands out for its sharp accuracy andreliablity in the field of automatic welding. However, domestic market of the commercialvisual tracking decice is dominated by expensive imported products at present, so it is still notsatisfy the demand for many small or parts of medium-sized enterprise. Therefore, a lowcost and practical laser structured-light seam tracking system was designed and built inreference of the development of visual sensing technology at home and abroad in thispaper.The system has been calibrated and preliminary seam tracking experiments has carriedon.Based on the imaging principle of structure light vision sensing in this paper,thestructure solutions of the visual sensor was designed, the design and processing of hardwareof the system was completed in this paper,the calibration of the syetem was realized andextracted features from the images of seams,gained the weld path,and cinverted into robotmotion path.Finally,the intelligent weld tracking was preliminarily realized.The visual seam tracking experiment was built on the basis of simple welding robot inthis paper.More details about this work in this paper include:designed a reasonable scheme ofvisual sensors,completed the desigen,processing,and selection of mechanical parts in thissystem,calibrated the visual tracking system using the Optrotrak Certus and it’s ownsoftware,configrated OpenCV on the basis of VC++6.0, and compeleted the processing ofseam image and the extraction of features.At the same time,the communication betweencomputer serial port and the robot was finished by using of VC++6.0ActiveXcontrol.Finally,conducted the seam tracking expriment,analyzed the experimental data andconfirmed the feasibility of the experiment,all this provides technical support for the system’sfurther improvement.