Vision-Based Forward Kinematics Using ANN for Weld Line Detection with a 5-DOF Robot Manipulator

While robotic manipulators are becoming a common sight in today’s industries and fast paced production lines, it is becoming difficult to develop foolproof methods for automation of these manipulators, owing to their geometric and structural variety. Creating a common algorithm for these manipulators would help in setting a base standard for their automation. Trio Motion coordinators are most widely used for robotic manipulators in recent times. The objective of this paper is to create a simple interface based on Visual Basic programming language to coordinate directly with the robot’s motion coordinator by bypassing all other programming methods which are otherwise needed for sending commands to the robot. This interface can be easily adapted for further tuning methods and also for more or lesser degrees-of-freedom robotic manipulators. MATLAB has been used for detecting the weld line in the image using image processing techniques. A suitable artificial neural network has been used to give forward kinematic solutions with image coordinates as the input.