Development Of NC System Of Laser Processing Machine And Study On Technology Of Weld Tracking

Laser processing, combining of light, mechanical and electrical technology, is an advanced manufacturing technology, which, for its own unique advantages, becomes an important futuristic processing means. The numerical control (NC) system widely applied in laser-processing machine at home and abroad currently is a kind of specialized and closed system. Due to its limitation in expansion and high price, the system can't meet the requirements of high flexibility and low cost in today's manufacturing industry. In recent years, study on NC technology has been focused more and more on the open NC system with outstanding flexibility and low cost, which also represents the developing direction of laser-processing NC technology. The main goal of open NC architecture is to realize the modularized, reconfigurable and expandable software and hardware system by which the flexibility of system would be improved and the users be allowed to choose functional modules, even to integrate, modify, and expand system, which can respond to the market rapidly and economically.Based on the research and development of the simultaneous motion of five-axis laser-processing machine-5LC, a novel open NC system taking PMAC (Programmable Multiple Axis Controller) as its control kernel is developed. Meanwhile, in order to enhance the degree of automation for laser weld, tracking weld seam technology is investigated thoroughly in the thesis. The main studied contents are as follows:1. The open NC system for the laser-processing machine is developed. Based on PMAC (Programmable Multiple Axis Controller), the hardware platform is constructed. The management software module of NC system used for processing data, on-line management of processing, and the processing modules of laser welding, laser cutting, laser quenching, are developed under VC++ 6.0 programming environment.2. According to the structure of 5LC, the kinematic model is established. Based on cutter location (CL) files, post-processing module is implemented, by which the automatic program is achieved. The experiments of laser quenching, as an applying example, are carried out, and the results show that the module fully satisfy the demand of design. 3. Based on model of the tracking weld seam system, the visual tracking hardware platform with CCD camera, image collecting card is build. The Camera calibration is completed, by which the internal and external parameters are finally determined. Meanwhile, some key technologies for visual weld tracking, such as image filtering, weld edge extraction, morphological image processing and so on, are studied deeply. The weld tracking experiment is given to validate the feasibility and efficiency of the visual system.