Optimal Pass Planning for Robotic Welding of Large-dimension Joints with Deep Grooves

Abstract

Large-dimension welding joints are widely used in shipyards and oilfields. These joints need multi-pass welding processes and tens of hours to complete. Although the development of robotic welding techniques shortens the welding time, it is important to have a detailed plan of the entire process before welding starts. During detailed planning, pass planning is crucial for the trajectory generation of the robot, since pass planning provides the welding sequence in a deep groove and the welding parameters of every pass. A knowledge database is used in this research to obtain the relationship between the bead geometry and welding parameters. For the pass planning of deep groove welding, this paper proposes an optimization method with the objective to maximize the section area of the weld bead, so that the number of passes can be minimized. The welding passes of a deep groove are planned using the proposed method. The planning results show that the optimization method is able to provide feasible passes and welding parameters for every pass.