Implementation of an Intelligent Robotized GMAW Welding Cell, Part 1: Design and Simulation

Today, welding tasks can be accomplished in two ways: 1) Manual or conventional, which is made by humans with a welding gun; and 2) Automated welding that is carried out by robots, this robots are called “Welding Robots”. Current welding robots are able to perform welding tasks continuously under different working conditions in low-scale production such as shipbuilding or in high-scale production such as in the automotive industry. Even in well defined and structured environments such as in the automotive industry robot reprogramming is still necessary in order to cope with uncertainties. This additional task involves hiring specialized personnel, lost of production time, quality assessment, destructive testing, etc., which necessarily increases the production costs. The design proposal considers first to simulate the whole welding process considering issues like floor plant space, robot configuration, trajectory planning, welding equipment and supplies, etc. and secondly, the utilization of novel teaching tools for welding trajectories. The contribution has been divided in two chapters as follows: In Part I, the robotic cell set up (including off-line and on-line programming) using current 3D software simulation, equipment commissioning and testing, distributed workcell communication and the voice-command program design are presented; while in Part II, the description of an error recovery strategy in conjunction with a novel teaching trajectory using machine vision is presented. In this chapter, we describe the design to integrate a robotic welding cell within a 3D simulation environment. The design was used as a reference for the actual construction of the robotized GMAW welding cell. We report a methodology to set up a welding robot cell from scratch using a 3D software robot simulation from Delmia named Robotics V5®. The simulation included welding accessories that were designed first in CAD software and imported by the Delmia® software. These accessories were gas tanks, wire coils, Lincoln 455 25