Authors: Weixi Wang Satoshi Yamane Tomoyuki Koike Jiro Touma Kazumichi Hosoya Toru Nakajima Hikaru Yamamoto
Publish Date: 2016/01/12
Volume: 86, Issue: 5-8, Pages: 1865-1872
Abstract
For automatic control in plasma welding PAW the welding situation must sometimes be observed in realtime However the welding quality of PAW depends on the performance of the tracking result Therefore to determine gaps in the welding we developed an image processing method that automatically tracks the weld line Since the plasma electrode is buried in the torch visual judgment by the human eye is difficult This method replaces human sight with a visible automatic profile control that exactly teaches the plasma torch during the welding process The image processing method for automatic tracking adopts a hybrid optimization process with template matching which identifies small parts of a welding characteristic image that match the template image In general template matching provides a partial quality control In special cases the welding gap and its boundary are effectively detected by a boundary detection method and variable gaps detected in the realtime tracking are analyzed to ensure highwelding quality In verification trials our method demonstrated efficient welding work and effectively reduced the false torch guidance
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