Composition And Structure Of Welding Robots

Welding robots mainly include two parts: robots and welding equipment. The robot consists of a robot body and a control cabinet (hardware and software). For example, welding equipment, such as arc welding and spot welding, consists of welding power supply (including its control system), wire feeder (arc welding), welding gun (pliers), etc. Intelligent robots should also have sensing systems, such as laser or camera sensors and their control devices.
Welding robots produced in various countries around the world are basically articulated robots, and most of them have 6 axes. Among them, axes 1, 2, and 3 can send the end tool to different spatial positions, while axes 4, 5, and 6 can solve different requirements for tool postures. There are two main forms of the mechanical structure of the welding robot body: one is a parallelogram structure, and the other is a side-mounted (swing) structure. The main advantage of the side-mounted (swing) structure is that the upper and lower arms have a large range of motion, so that the robot's working space can almost reach a sphere. Therefore, this robot can be hung upside down on the frame to work, so as to save floor space and facilitate the flow of ground objects. However, this side-mounted robot has a cantilever structure for the 2nd and 3rd axes, which reduces the rigidity of the robot. It is generally suitable for robots with smaller loads and is used for arc welding, cutting or spraying. The upper arm of the parallelogram robot is driven by a pull rod. The pull rod and the lower arm form two sides of a parallelogram. Hence the name. The early developed parallelogram robots had a relatively small workspace (limited to the front of the robot) and were difficult to work upside down. However, the new parallelogram robots (parallel robots) developed since the late 1980s have been able to expand the workspace to the top, back and bottom of the robot, and do not have the rigidity problem of the measuring robot, so they have received widespread attention. This structure is suitable not only for light but also for heavy robots. In recent years, robots for spot welding (load 100-150kg) mostly use robots with parallelogram structures.