An Imaging and Measurement System for Robust Reconstruction of Weld Pool During Arc Welding

Robust measurement of the specular weld pool surface can help better understand the complex welding processes and provide feedback for robotic welding. The strong arc light and the specular surface of the weld pool make it difficult for the direct sensing measurement. In this paper, a novel imaging and measurement system is proposed, and it makes use of the strong penetrability of the laser to avoid the interference of arc light and obtain the surface information of the weld pool. By intercepting the reflection of a projected laser pattern twice, the proposed system gives a closed-form solution for each reflected ray and a closed-form solution for the corresponding point on the weld pool surface. The weld pool surface can be thus reconstructed by one-shot structured light projection. To increase the robustness of the measurement system, the least deformation principle is proposed to rectify the coefficient errors of the computed plane equation. Finally, a sequence of 3-D weld pools is reconstructed and compared with state-of-art literature. The comparison verifies that our method is significantly better than all the other methods in measuring the 3-D weld pool shapes.