Position Estimation of the Welding Panels for Sub-assembly line in Shipbuilding by Vision System

시각 장치를 사용한 조선 소조립 라인에서의 용접부재 위치 인식

The welding automation in ship manufacturing process,especially in the sub-assembly line is considered to be a difficult job because the welding part is too huge, various, unstructured for a welding robot to weld fully automatically. The weld orocess at the sub-assembly line for ship manufacturing is to joint the various stiffener on the base panel. In order to realize automatic robot weld in sub-assembly line, robot have to equip with the sensing system to recognize the position of the parts. In this research,we developed a vision system to detect the position of base panle for sub-assembly line is shipbuilding process. The vision system is composed of one CCD camera attached on the base of robot, 2-500W halogen lamps for active illumination. In the image processing algorithm,the base panel is represented by two set of lines located at its two corner through hough transform. However, the various noise line caused by highlight,scratches and stiffener,roller in conveyor, and so on is contained in the captured image, this nosie can be eliminated by region segmentation and threshold in hough transform domain. The matching process to recognize the position of weld panel is executed by finding patterns in the Hough transformed domain. The sets of experiments performed in the sub-assembly line show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.