Development of welding profile sensor and its application

This paper describes the development of a welding profile sensor for the laser welding robot application. The sensor consists of a PC based vision camera and a stripe-type laser diode. AN components are assembled into a compact module which can be attached to the end-effector of welding robots. The laser-stripe sensor can measure the profile of the welding object and obtain the seam line. Moreover, the working distance of the sensor can be varied. The robot, the seam tracking system, and CW Nd:YAG laser are used for the laser welding robot system. The simple control scheme of the whole system is also presented. The profile measurement and the seam tracking experiments were carried out to validate the operation of the system.