Predictive seam tracking with iteratively learned feedforward compensation for high-precision robotic laser welding

In this paper, a novel architecture for robotic seam tracking using an industrial robot and off-the-shelf sensors is proposed to compensate the residual errors that are commonly observed in high-precision robotic laser welding due to the nonlinearity of a seam and the fast path drifts along a robot path. Our experiments demonstrate that the robot system can track both linear and nonlinear long seams at a high speed of 100 mm/s with TCP offset-error within ±0.1 mm using the proposed method.