Page 5 - Welding Robots Technology, System Issues, and Applications

Foreword

Industrial robots are essential components of today’s factory and even more of the
factory of the future. The demand for the use of robots stems from the potential for
flexible, intelligent machines that can perform tasks in a repetitive manner at
acceptable cost and quality levels. The most active industry in the application of
robots is the automobile industry and there is great interest in applying robots to
weld and assembly operations, and material handling.

For the sake of competitiveness in modern industries, manual welding must be
limited to shorter periods of time because of the required setup time, operator
discomfort, safety considerations and cost. Thus, robotic welding is critical to
welding automation in many industries. It is estimated as much as 25% of all
industrial robots are being used for welding tasks.

Robotic welding is being initiated to satisfy a perceived need for high-quality
welds in shorter cycle times. The first generation of robotic welding system was a
two-pass weld system, where the first pass is dedicated to learning the seam
geometry followed by the actual tracking and welding in the second pass. The
second generation of welding systems, on the other hand, track the seam in real-
time, performing simultaneously the learning and the seam tracking phases. The
third generation of welding systems not only operates in real-time but also learns
the rapid changing in seam geometries while operating within unstructured
environments. Flexibility was achieved with this third generation of welding
systems but at the expenses of a considerable amount of programming work of
high skilled people in system’s integration directed to specific applications.
However, availability and agility are additional key issues in modern
manufacturing industries, demanding new welding systems incorporating these
features as well, revealing in this way the flexibility of the system to the normal
operator without the need of extra skills from him.

This book covers up-to-date and relevant work in the area of third generation of
robotic welding systems with availability and agility features. The principal

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