Two arc welding robots coordinated with 3-D vision sensor

In this paper we propose an arc welding robot system, where two robots work coordinately using a vision sensor. One robot manipulator holds a welding target like a positioning device, and the other robot manipulator moves the welding torch. The vision sensor is mounted on the tip of one of the robots and detects the 3-dimensional shape of the groove on the welding target. Due to this vision sensor the teaching tasks of the coordinated motion control are simplified considerably. In order to realize fast image processing of the vision sensor, five sets of high-speed parallel data processing units are employed. Experimental results reveal the applicability of our system