Continuous surface tracking for welding robot

This paper describes a continuous surface tracking method applied to welding robot. Two fuzzy logic controllers are designed to maintain linear distance and welding torch angle. The welding toolset and controllers are decoupled from the inverse kinematics chain of the robot so that they can be applied to various types of robot model without modification. Range sensors are applied to give linear distance and angle information while the welding torch attached to the robot is moving over surface of the workpiece. The simulation results in three-dimensional graphical simulator illustrate the performance of the controllers under various shapes of continuous surface.