Modeling the Seam Teaching Process for Robotic Laser Welding

摘要

Robotic laser welding imposes high demands on the accuracy of the laser focal point with respect to the joint to be welded.Sensors measuring close to the laser focal point are therefore required to make robotic laser welding successful in a production environment.Because of the high accuracy requirements, even small imperfections in the system can have a bad influence on the resulting accuracy during welding.This paper gives a general framework of the coordinate frames that occur in a sensor-guided robotic laser welding cell.A simulation environment of the process of teaching seam locations with the use of a seam tracking sensor is developed.With such simulations the influence of position and orientation errors in the laser tool frame and sensor tool frame can be visualized.Furthermore the influence of errors in the kinematic model of the robot controller is shown.The knowledge obtained with these simulations gives insight for the development of more intelligent seam teaching algorithms that minimize these influences.