A Method of Welding Path Planning of Steel Mesh Based on Point Cloud for Welding Robot
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A Method of Welding Path Planning of Steel Mesh Based on Point Cloud for Welding Robot Yusen Geng Center for Robotics, School of Control Science and Engi- neering, Shandong University Jinan 250061, China Yuankai Zhang Center for Robotics, School of Control Science and Engi- neering, Shandong University Jinan 250061, China Xincheng Tian ( [email protected] ) Center for Robotics, School of Control Science and Engi- neering, Shandong University Jinan 250061, China Xiaorui Shi Sinotruk Industry Park Zhangqiu, Sinotruk Jinan Power Co.,Ltd. Jinan 250220, China Xiujing Wang Sinotruk Industry Park Zhangqiu, Sinotruk Jinan Power Co.,Ltd. Jinan 250220, China Yigang Cui Sinotruk Industry Park Zhangqiu, Sinotruk Jinan Power Co.,Ltd. Jinan 250220, China Research Article Keywords: Without teaching and programming, 3D structured light camera, Steel mesh point cloud, Welding path planning Posted Date: April 7th, 2021 DOI: https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-379414/v1 License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Read Full License Version of Record: A version of this preprint was published at The International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology on July 15th, 2021. See the published version at https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-021-07601-6. Noname manuscript No. (will be inserted by the editor) 1 2 3 4 5 6 A method of welding path planning of steel mesh based on 7 8 point cloud for welding robot 9 10 Yusen Geng1,2 · Yuankai Zhang1,2 · Xincheng Tian1,2 B · Xiaorui Shi3 · 11 Xiujing Wang3 · Yigang Cui3 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 Received: date / Accepted: date 19 20 21 Abstract At present, the operators needs to carry out 1 Introduction 22 complicated teaching and programming work on the 23 welding path planning for the welding robot before weld- With the rapid development of automation and robot 24 ing the steel mesh. In this work, an automatic weld- technologies, the welding robots are widely applied into 25 ing path planning method of steel mesh based on point the welding environment to replace human work. The 26 cloud is proposed to simplify the complicated teach- teaching-playback mode of welding robots still plays 27 ing and programming work in welding path planning. an important role in the current industrial production. 28 The point cloud model of steel mesh is obtained by However, the operator needs to carry out complicated 29 three-dimensional vision structured light camera. Then teaching and programming work on the welding path of 30 we use the relevant point cloud processing algorithm to this mode of welding robot before welding. Meanwhile, 31 32 calculate the welding path of the steel mesh, and obtain this work has high requirements for the operator’s op- 33 the 3D information of the welding path for the welding eration level and the accuracy. To conquer the above 34 localization of the robot welding process. Experimen- problems, many researchers study on weld extraction 35 tal results show that the method can accurately realize and welding planning using different sensors for differ- 36 the welding path planning of the steel mesh and accom- ent workpieces. 37 plish the welding task without teaching and program- In the application and research of welding robot, the 38 ming before welding, which improves the production mainly used sensor include infrared sensors [1], RGB-D 39 efficiency. sensors [2,3] and vision sensors [4,5]. The vision sensors 40 of welding robots could be divided into two-dimensional 41 Keywords Without teaching and programming · 3D (2D) vision sensors and three-dimensional(3D) vision 42 structured light camera · Steel mesh point cloud · sensors. The use of 2D vision sensor in welding process 43 Welding path planning 44 mostly needs to cooperate with laser sensor. For exam- 45 ple, Wang et al. [6] proposed a method of combining 46 B Xincheng Tian: laser and vision sensor to identify V-shaped welds of 47 E-mail: [email protected] oil pipelines through image processing, which can be 48 Yusen Geng: E-mail: gys [email protected] used for subsequent trajectory planning. Xu et al. [7] 49 designed a set of real-time welding seam tracking sys- 50 tem based on laser and vision sensor, through an im- 51 1 Center for Robotics, School of Control Science and Engi- proved Canny algorithm to detect the edges of seam 52 neering, Shandong University 53 Jinan 250061, China and pool, which could better overcome the deficiencies 54 2 Engineering Research Center of Intelligent Unmanned of the welding seam tracking control of the teaching- 55 System, Ministry of Education playback mode during welding process. Jinan 250061, China 56 3 Sinotruk Industry Park Zhangqiu, Sinotruk Jinan Power Compared with the 2D vision sensor, the 3D vi- 57 Co.,Ltd. sion sensor can obtain 3D coordinate information of the 58 Jinan 250220, China workpiece and accurate completely the welding task. 59 At present, Linear structured light vision sensors and 60 61 62 63 64 65 2 Yusen Geng1,2 et al. 1 2 stereo vision sensors are the commonly used 3D vision 2 Experiment platform configuration and 3 sensors in robot welding task. For the use of Linear framework 4 structured light vision sensors, Zeng et al. [8] proposed 5 a narrow butt 3D off-line welding path planning method 2.1 Experiment system 6 based on a laser structured light sensor. Hou et al. [9] 7 proposed non-instructional welding method of robotic The robot welding system of the experimental plat- 8 gas metal arc welding (GMAW) based on laser struc- form is shown in Fig. 1. It consists of two parts: the 9 tured light vision sensing system (LVSS) , and exper- welding execution system and the 3D vision system 10 iments on V-grooves and fillet welds were performed. [12]. The welding execution system includes the weld- 11 The 3D structured light could obtain the global infor- ing torch, the wire feeder, the manipulator, the robot 12 controller and the cross steel mesh, which is used to 13 mation of the welding environment. However, the laser complete the welding of the intersections of steel mesh. 14 structured light vision could only obtain the local infor- 15 mation. Therefore, the linear structured light is mostly The 3D vision system includes a 3D surface scanning 16 used for the online identification and tracking of the structured light camera and an industrial personal com- 17 weld seam. It is not suitable for the off-line 3D path puter(IPC), which is used to obtain the 3D information 18 planning of the welding robot. of the cross steel mesh in the camera field of vision. 19 20 To overcome the deficiency of linear structured light 21 sensor and realize accurate and efficient off-line 3D path 22 Welding Torch planning, using the stereo structured light sensor to 3D Surface Scanning 23 Wire Feeder generate point cloud and using the point cloud pro- Structured Light Camera 24 cessing method to process it has become a new scheme 25 to solve the path planning of welding robot without 26 Robot Controller 27 teaching and programming. Lei et al. [10] proposed a 28 novel 3D path extraction method of weld seams based 29 on point cloud , which could well serve for the 3D path Workpiece 30 teaching task before welding. Zhang et al. [11] proposed Manipulator Industrial Personal Computer 31 point cloud based approach to recognize working envi- 32 ronment and locate welding initial position using laser 33 stripe sensor. Fig. 1 The robot welding system 34 35 Few researches hammer at automatic welding path The manipulator used in the experimental platform 36 planning method of welding robot under the condition 37 is universal robots 5(UR5), and the 3D surface scanning of without teaching and programming. With the devel- 38 industrial camera is chishine surface 120, as shown in 39 opment of society and the infrastructure construction, Fig. 2. It should be noted that the installation position 40 structural parts, such as steel cage and steel mesh are of 3D surface scanning structured light camera needs to 41 widely used. At the same time, the welding of steel mesh ensure that the welding torch does not enter the field of 42 faces scenes with many crossing points, which results in vision of the camera. The characteristics of 3D surface 43 the cumbersome teaching process. Therefore, using the scanning structured light camera are shown in Table 1. 44 point cloud processing method to plan the welding path 45 of steel mesh is an important part of solving the com- 46 plex teaching and programming problems of welding 2.2 Steel mesh model 47 robot before welding. 48 In order to clearly introduce the method of plan- 49 In this paper, an automatic welding path planning ning the welding path of steel mesh, the steel mesh 50 method of steel mesh based on point cloud is proposed, model used in this paper is shown in Fig. 3a. For the 51 52 which realizes the welding path planning of welding convenience of robot welding, there is a gap at the in- 53 robot without teaching and programming. Section 2 in- tersection of the upper and lower steel bars of the steel 54 troduces the configuration of the experiment system; mesh model. The upper steel bars are supported by two 55 Section 3 illustrates the steps of point cloud preprocess- fixed-size support plates on the left and right sides, and 56 ing; Section 4 illustrates the step of welding path plan- the relevant dimensions of the model are marked in the 57 ning; Section 5 shows about the analysis of the experi- top view of the steel mesh with the main optical axis of 58 mental results, and finally, the conclusion and prospect the camera as the main viewing direction.Fig.