Design and Development of a Low Cost Hybrid Sensor System for Welding Manufacturing

The high demand of technology to increase the quality control in welding applications is a convenient opportunity for industrial sensors. The products that require welding process during production are subjected to strict quality controls where conventional or automated sensor-less welding processes are not able to achieve high standards during the production. Additionally, metal inner gas (MIG) welding sensors are still of high cost, especially for medium-sized companies seeking access to a system that allows them to improve the excellence of their products. In this paper we propose the development of a low cost hybrid sensor system for the automation of the welding process, which is compatible with industrial robots. It is designed with a simple graphical user interface (GUI) that assists the operator to perform and control the welding task, store values for quality control, and send commands to an automated welding system, in order to increases the quality of the product. We present, details of the design and development process of the hybrid sensor system for tracking and welding inspections, preliminary experiments to validate the use of the system in an automated welding process, and the discussion of the results.