Research On Virtual Reality Monitoring System Of Vertical Pipe Automatic Welding Equipment

Tele-operation welding can perform tasks in dangerous extreme environment instead of humans,so it becomes the most effective method to carry out missions such as nuclear power station maintenance,space station construction and offshore structure building.Application of virtual reality in remotely controlled welding will turn into a new trend,which is attributed to great improvement during the recent years.The monitoring system based on visual reality technology can bring operator deep immersion close to the real environment,real time and precise catching for running state of physical welding equipment in the worksite,and is very suitable to be integrated into the robot system to perform remote monitoring.Vertical pipe automatic welding equipment is selected as breakthrough point,and several key technologies of visual reality technology applied in monitoring on remotely controlled welding system are researched to promote monitoring level of the welding process.Main research work of this paper is described as follows:(1)According to design requirements for the virtual reality monitoring system of the automatic welding equipment,the overall technical scheme is put forward in which Unity3D is chosen as the main software development platform,and also the virtual reality monitoring system of the vertical pipe automatic welding equipment is constructed.(2)Based on the comprehensive utilization of the UG,Unity 3D and other software,a 3D model of the virtual reality monitoring system of the vertical pipe automatic welding equipment is created which is mainly composed of the automatic welding car,auxiliary equipment,and virtual camera,therefore,the 3D model is also rendered to bring better presence to the whole virtual scene.(3)Communication between the virtual reality monitoring system and the control system of the welding equipment is realized,by adjusting scanning cycle in the TwinCAT PLC properly and calling FixedUpdate()in Unity3D,communication time delay is optimized and real time performance is improved.(4)Virtual reality monitoring system program of the vertical pipe automatic welding equipment is realized using C#language,which is mainly composed of welding database,human machine interface,welding arc effects,and collision detection function module and so on.Tests are carried out to check welding car real time motion monitoring function and parameter setting function of the virtual reality monitoring system,which indicates that the virtual system can precisely feedback weldig car posture in real time,can help operator to scroll,zoom and rotate the image,also can remotely control welding car by parameters input through human machine interface.(5)Based on the analysis of horizontal position GMAW weld pool feature and support by related welding process parameters algorithms,a computer aided process planning(CAPP)program is realized using C#language.Effectiveness of the CAPP program is tested by welding trials,which shows that it can help operator to determine welding process parameters more reasonably.