Welding toolpath generation

[savolla]

Hi, first of all thank you for creating this awesome repo! I want to use this repo for robotic welding operation but I'm not sure if it suits my needs. I'm using Tesseract for motion planning but the only thing I need is generating a collision-free toolpaths. I saw that all the examples work on a "surface". As you know welding robots usually operate on perpendicular surfaces like T-profiles. Sometimes they weld inside box like shapes which is closed from all sides. I wonder if generating toolpaths under these kinds of constraints would be possible or not. Thanks!

[DavidMerzJr]

Hi @savolla, thanks for your interest! Most of the tools in this repository are set up for generating 'coverage' toolpaths on a surface. As you pointed out, welding isn't usually attempting to cover a surface. However, provided you have mesh/CAD models for the pieces you want to weld together, there are a few pieces that might help.

The segmentation_server from the main noether package is designed to separate surfaces into separate pieces based on high-curvature boundaries. This would be able to separate the two surfaces that are to be welded together.

There are two edge planners available in the tool_path_planner package: the eigen_value_edge_generator and halfedge_edge_generator. These are both designed to locate the edges of meshes/models and place evenly spaced waypoints along that edge. I believe they are both exposed through the tool_path_planner_server in the main noether package.

The combination of these two might be able to get you semi-automatic weld paths - if you split the mesh into separate surfaces and get paths along the edges of both, the weld seams are the 'overlapping' paths, where one edge from each piece is present.

I'm sorry we don't have something more out-of-the-box for you, but welding is something we hope to spend more effort on in the future. Feel free to continue asking questions!