At present, spherical tank manufacture is still staying at the level of manual welding or semi-automation. In order to improve quality of weld seam and guarantee safe operating of spherical tank, automatic welding equipment is needed urgently. A intelligent wheeled mobile robot equipped with CCD based visual sensor has been developed to acquire better weld quality in this research. Special mechanical structure has been proposed based a wheeled mobile robot body to realize reliably and flexibly absorbing and moving on the surface of spherical tank. A 3-DOF welding manipulator has been fixed on the robot to carry out welding tasks. A CCD sensor has been used to detect weld seam for the trajectory planing of both the mobile robot and the welding torch, control strategy for nonholonomic system with redundant DOF has been put forward to realize the accurate tracing of weld torch, an intelligent controller has been designed. In this paper, mechanical structure of robot, principle of CCD sensor, tracing model for robot and welding torch, and intelligent controller have been presented in details respectively. Experiments show that this robot can fulfill all-position welding tasks freely on the surface of tank with high weld torch tracing accuracy(up to +/- 0.5mm).