Welding Seam Tracking System for Gas Metal Arc Welding of Container Girders.

In the processes of automatic welding of container girders, the uneven strong reflection on the workpiece surfaces, arc light, splash, and smoke easily led to inaccurate or difficult identification of weld deviations, so a welding seam tracking system for gas metal arc welding of container girders was proposed. Based on a low-cost structured light vision sensor, a highly robust welding seam feature extraction model was established. The linear slope of the laser stripes was used by the model for optimizing the random sampling processes of the random sampling consistency algorithm which achieved stable extraction of weld feature in complex environments. The welding test results on the surface of uneven and strong reflective workpieces show that the average detection errors of the method in the Y and Z directions are as 0.22 mm respectively and 0.19 mm with the welding parameters of 300 A, 29 V, and 1m/min, which achieves stable high precision welding seam tracking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]