Path Planning With Automatic Seam Extraction Over Point Cloud Models for Robotic Arc Welding

• Published in: IEEE robotics and automation letters Vol. 6; no. 3; pp. 5002 - 5009
• Main Authors: Zhou, Peng, Peng, Rui, Xu, Maggie, Wu, Victor, Navarro-Alarcon, David
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 01.07.2021; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Arc seam welding; Automatic welding; Cameras; Industrial robots; Iterative algorithms; Matrix decomposition; motion and path planning; Noise reduction; Path planning; RGB-D perception; Robot vision systems; Robotics; Robots; Surface reconstruction; Three dimensional models; Three-dimensional displays; Welding; Workpieces
• ISSN: 2377-3766; 2377-3766
• DOI: 10.1109/LRA.2021.3070828

This letter presents a point cloud based robotic system for arc welding. Using hand gesture controls, the system scans partial point cloud views of workpiece and reconstructs them into a complete 3D model by a linear iterative closest point algorithm. Then, a bilateral filter is extended to denoise the workpiece model and preserve important geometrical information. To extract the welding seam from the model, a novel intensity-based algorithm is proposed that detects edge points and generates a smooth 6-DOF welding path. The methods are tested on multiple workpieces with different joint types and poses. Experimental results prove the robustness and efficiency of this robotic system on automatic path planning for welding applications.