ROBOT ARC-WELDING OPERATIONS PLANNING WITH A ROTATING TILTING POSITIONER/

Robotic are welding has been popular in the welding industry. Major em phasis has been placed on integrating robots with the gas-metal are we lding process due to its predominant use in industry. But, the program ming of robots for are welding is still a time-consuming process. It n eeds substantial expertise in both robotics and the are welding proces s. Thus much effort in robot are welding programming is concentrated o n off-line programming. The OF-Line Programming (OLP) of robotic are w elding requires sophisticated process planning composed of various sta ges such as robot and positioner motion planning, collision avoidance, weld sequencing, CAD data interfacing, weldseam tracking, and calibra tion of the robot arm and robotic workcell. However, existing OLP syst ems do not provide welding operations planning such as weld sequencing and positioner motion planning. Furthermore, they do not consider bot h workcell productivity and weld quality in the robotic welding cell, which are closely associated with the robot configuration. This is due to unstructured and compound characteristics of welding operations in volving the determination of robot welding configurations, weldline cl ustering and sequencing, and multi-weldline/multi-pass welding plannin g. In this paper, we will present a method for robotic are welding ope rations planning that can support the robot OLP; namely, a down-hand w elding algorithm using a rotating and tilting positioner, a robotic we lding stability model associated with weld quality and cell productivi ty, and operations planning procedures for robotic multi-weldline/mult i-pass welding.