An automatic golf head robotic welding system using 3D machine vision system

A robotic automatic welding system is constructed for welding golf heads. This system uses machine vision technique to recognize the weldseam and generated welding path for the robot. The location of the weldseam is discovered by applying a Sobel mask to the captured data. Laplace mask is also useful to filter out the noise points due to the scatter light refraction of tack-welding spots. The weldseam is then replenished and smoothed out by B-spline curve fitting. The task frame of the weldseam is computed by finding the tangent, normal, and bi-normal of the curve. The robotic welding path is obtained by further rotations and translation along the axes of the task frame according to the requirement of the welding attitude. The developed machine vision technique and the mathematic framework pertaining to the generation of welding task frame can readily be used for various three-dimensional welding.