Wall climbing welding robot for automatic welding of spherical tanks

FENG Xiaobing; PAN Jiluan; GAO Lisheng; TIAN Wei; WEI Ran; PAN Baiwa; CHEN Yong; CHEN Suyun

doi:10.16511/j.cnki.qhdxxb.2020.26.037

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Journal of Tsinghua University(Science and Technology) ›› 2021, Vol. 61 ›› Issue (10) : 1132-1143. DOI: 10.16511/j.cnki.qhdxxb.2020.26.037

MECHANICAL ENGINEERING

Wall climbing welding robot for automatic welding of spherical tanks

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Abstract

Automatic welding of large steel structures, especially three-dimensional spherical surfaces, requires a mechanism that can walk on the spherical surface and a stable welding tracking control system. This paper describes a wall-climbing robot that combines a crawler with a wheel to balance the required flexibility of the wall-climbing mechanism and the load capacity. The robot can automatically identify the weld position through a visual tracking system and intelligently determine the weld path to enable autonomous movement and tracking of the weld. The flexible, trackless crawler body adapts to large curvature changes in the spherical tank and can walk freely on the tank surface to provide efficient automatic welding of spherical tanks.

Key words

wall-climbing welding robot / large structural parts / spherical tank / automatic welding / visual tracking system

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FENG Xiaobing, PAN Jiluan, GAO Lisheng, TIAN Wei, WEI Ran, PAN Baiwa, CHEN Yong, CHEN Suyun. Wall climbing welding robot for automatic welding of spherical tanks[J]. Journal of Tsinghua University(Science and Technology). 2021, 61(10): 1132-1143 https://doi.org/10.16511/j.cnki.qhdxxb.2020.26.037

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