Recently, robot systems are widely utilized in the shipbuilding industry to enhance the productivity by automating the welding process. In order to increase productivity, it is necessary to reduce the time used for robot teaching. In this work, the automatic teaching system is developed for the subassembly process in the shipbuilding industry. A laser/vision sensor is designed to detect the weld seam and the image of the fillet joint is processed using the arm method. Positions of weld seams defined in the CAD database are transformed into the robot coordinate, and the dynamic programming technique is applied to find the sub-optimum weld path. Experiments are carried out to verify the system performance. The results show that the proposed automatic teaching system performs successfully and can be applied to the robot system in the subassembly process.
