An Efficient Calibration Procedure of Arc Welding Robots for Offline Programming Application

Abstract

Most industrial robots cannot be off-line programmed to carry out a task accurately, unless their kinematic model is suitably corrected through a calibration procedure. However, normal calibration is an expensive and time-consumming precedure due to the highly accurate measurement equipment required and due to the significant amount of data that must be collected. This paper presents a simple and economic procedure to improve the efficiency of robot calibration especially for arc welding application. To simplify the measurement process, an automotic data measurement algorithm as well as a simple measurement device are developed. Also, a calibration algorithm which can automatically identify the independent model parameters to be estimated is presented. To demonstrated the simplicity and the effectiveness of the procedure, experimental studies and computer simulations are performed and their results are discussed.