Welding Robot Programming: A Roundup
, by Jim Ryan, 1 min reading time
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Whether you're an expert or a novice at programming your welding robot, you can probably find some useful insights in these posts.
A Few Basic Tips
Just to get started we have an overview from Hirebotics and a few notes on programming challenges and best practices from Genesis Systems.
Deep Dives
Going deeper, we have a couple of hours of material. First, a post with details about general do's and don'ts, torch do's and don'ts, and considerations that need to be made regarding the power source and the robot.
Next, Brent Harkness takes us to school through videos. (I won't embed the videos here but just link to them.) We have his basics on how to program linear and circular welds for MIG/GMAW, his lesson on programming a weave pattern, dealing with robot faults, changing parameters, and programming for touch-ups.
Finally, an academic paper by engineers specializing in welding technology. From the abstract:
This work describes various aspects of robotic welding, programming of robotic welding systems, and problems associated with the technique. It further discusses commercially available seam-tracking and seam-finding sensors and presents a practical case application of sensors for semi-autonomous robotic welding. This study increases familiarity with robotic welding and the role of sensors in robotic welding and their associated problems.
The paper takes us through the history and theory, offline and online programming, adaptive control, the importance of sensors, and more.
Offline Programming
Speaking of offline programming, we have an introduction to it by Andrew Swary at The Welder, pros and cons from Octopuz at the Association for Advanced Automation, ideas from Alma here (a video) and here.