Applying shared visual control to telerobotic welding seam tracking

In order to enhance the flexibility of telerobotic welding seam tracking, increase the tracking precision and alleviate the payload of human operator, this paper researched the shared visual control technology based on laser vision sensor. The laser vision sensor captures the profile images of welding seam are produced by the triangulation principle. It can extract feature point of welding seam and teach the path to welding robot automatically. By the Resolved-Rate Control algorithm, manual commands of human operator by input device and automatic teaching commands of laser vision sensor are combined in the welding telerobot controller to control the six degree-of-freedom (DOF) of welding torch cooperatively or respectively. The control authority can be alternated or shared between local autonomous control and direct manual control to realize the precise seam tracking in remote environment. In this paper, the experimental system of telerobotic welding seam tracking had been set up and the experimental results are presented. The experimental results indicated that human operator was removed from low-level control loop. Welding torch can be guided flexibility by manual mode and autonomous mode alternatively. It is easy to avoid obstacle in unstructured environment.