Discrete Elite PSO Based Welding Robot Path Planning

Welding is an important part of industrial manufacturing and processing sectors, sometimes welding quality plays a decisive role in product quality. Welding robots are widely used in machinery manufacturing, nuclear industry, aerospace, energy, transportation and electronics industries etc. Depending on the ways of welding, the welding process generally can be divided into spot welding and arc welding, the welding path planning described in this article is based on spot welding (point to point, PTP) system. In most welding tasks, an important issue need to be considered is how to make the welding torch through all solder joints, especially when the number of weld joints to a large level, this problem becomes particularly important. Rational path planning of weld joints sequence can reduce welding time, improve the welding quality and productivity in welding robot processes. The traditional planning method usually based on teach repeatedly manual optimization, is time consuming, cannot effectively take into account constraints like welding deformation, and the planning results are not satisfactory either. Currently, two welding robot systems are increasingly being used in many manufacturing process, hence path planning problems of dual welding robots need to be considered too. During the welding process, welding distortion is another problem in welding tasks, welding deformation can lead to inconsistent quality of the work-piece, as a result, how to reduce welding deformation is increasingly valued in the welding process.In recent years, with the development of computer science, intelligent algorithms get more and more attention from researchers and are widely used to solve practical problems. Particle swarm optimization algorithm (PSO) is a developed intelligent algorithm in recent years based on swarm intelligence. In this article, PSO is considered to solve welding robot path planning after algorithm discretization and global optimization capability improvement based on elite strategy.Then, the path planning problems are solved by the improved PSO when the shortest path length was considered as the optimization criterion and welding deformation is involved. In double welding robot welding path planning, two welding robots are also required no interference with each other. In this article, an algorithm is proposed to solve double welding robots path planning problem with constrain of avoiding mutual interference and deformation, the optimal welding sequence in double robots welding system can make the welding length is shortest or close to shortest.