Development of a Welding Robot for a Narrow Space of Offshore Platforms

In this paper, a welding mobile manipulator for building offshore platforms is introduced. First of all, forward kinematics to analyze the relation between the joint angle inputs and the position and orientation of the end-effector is performed. Then, a motion planning algorithm using Jacobian is proposed. To solve a localization problem, a localization algorithm based on particle filters is applied. To verify the proposed methods, several simulations including a motion planning and localization simulations are performed. For a better welding motion, the optimal position of the mobile platform is proposed. Finally, the feasibility of the proposed welding robot system through an experiment is verified.