Design and Analysis of a Welding Robot

In this paper, the design and implementation of a novel welding robot is presented. The robot welds boiler pipes of power plants. The automation of this process is needed because of the high rework expense to repair defective connections, which are unavoidable in manual welding. The mechanism of the robot is capable of maneuvering between the pipes and adjusting to the specified range of pipes´ diameter; it is also low in weight and portable which offers the operator the opportunity to work in variable manufacturing conditions. Moreover, the selection of a wide range of welding machines is possible. This paper shows how the robot is modeled and the description of the mechanism is given. The way in which the welding path is designed given the spatial trajectory and arc welding conditions is described. The welding, geometric and dynamic parameters define the essential simulation program, to optimize the mechanism and satisfy the constraints. The controller design algorithm is also investigated and the modified transpose Jacobian controlling algorithm is considered for this purpose. Its performance is compared to similar standard methods. The results illustrate the competitive performance of this algorithm i.e. the method is not only numerically simple but also is model independent.