Kinematical modeling of mobile welding robot for lattice type seam tracking

For the automation of lattice type seam welding in building ship, an autonomous mobile robot system is developed in this paper. The robot is composed of two driving wheels, a horizontal torch slider, a vertical torch slider and a rotational arc sensor. Tracking errors are detected by the rotational arc sensor. The kinematics model of the mobile robot is established firstly, and then the moving path of the robot at the corner is planned based on the kinematics mode, and the trajectory and velocity of the welding gun is analyzed. A fuzzy controller based on the planned trajectory and tracking errors is designed. The simulation and experiments have been done to verify the effectiveness of the proposed controller.