11. Process Settings

Tutorial

This tutorial covers the different options and settings available to adjust in the process settings.

Prerequisites and Resources

This tutorial will cover a deeper look at the process setting type we looked at briefly in the Weld Setting’s Overview tutorial. If you haven’t completed that tutorial, it’s recommended that you visit that first to get a general understanding of all the various settings in weld settings.

Before starting with the tutorial, ensure to have the Universal Robots UR10e example cell downloaded and imported into Verbotics Weld. This cell is available to download from the examples page on our website.

This walkthrough also uses the process settings example project which can be downloaded here.

Video Tutorial

Step by Step Guide

Introduction

Step 1 - Creating a New Process Setting

When you create a welding program in Verbotics Weld, it follows a specified set of default settings. However, with our sample part today, we actually want to specify and adjust several of the weld process options.

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Process Settings

We can start by selecting weld settings in the settings tab then, on the left hand side, select the weld process option and create a new set of settings clicking the create button indicated with the blue plus icon. Name this new settings group “General”. Now we’ll go through and explore each option one-by-one:

  1. Welding Speed - The speed value allows us to increase or decrease the speed the robot welds at, having a significant effect on the completion time but risks lower quality welds.

  2. Additional Stick Out - Stick-out allows us to specify a range of allowable stick out, however we can also restrict this to only utilise the optimal value of stick out, for our example project we’ll set this as 6.35 mm. However, note that reducing the stick out too much can potentially make it harder for some robots to complete difficult welds.

  3. Travel Angle and Work Angle - Allows for you to increase or decrease the minimum, maximum and optimal travel/work angle your robot is to weld at.

    For example, adjust the travel angle minimum to 0 and attempt to weld the long weld along the length of the small sample part. You’ll notice that drag has been eliminated, but note that now it also cannot complete the weld without colliding with the cylinder.

  4. Position - When using a robot positioner, this option will also appear. The position option specifies a specific orientation for the weld to be completed in, of which there are several options which are shown below:

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Position Options Available in Process Settings

Step 2 - Advanced Weld Process Settings

Moving on from the general process settings, go ahead and create a new process settings. Name this “Advanced”. With this new settings, in the options pane locate the blue text labelled Show advanced settings... and select it. This will enable the advanced options, where we’ll see several new options appear. The first of these, for ABB robots specifically, allows us to set an ABB robot’s:

  • Voltage

  • Current

  • Wire feed speed

The values adjusted here will update the output seam data for your ABB robot.

In addition to the ABB limited options, we can also now restrict the torch travel direction within a certain range from the weld direction using the wire rotation option. Enable this, leaving the value as 0, and then return to the viewer, using the weld trouble shooter you should see the robot can no longer rotate the torch angle which now must remain inline with the weld direction.

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Position Options Available in Process Settings

Step 3 - Weave and Tracking

The advanced settings also reveals two additional tabs at the top of the weld process settings, the first of these being weave and tracking. The weave and tracking options allow you to enable weaving during welding. Go ahead and select the weave and tracking process setting option, and we’ll explore how to properly set this up. Now click enable weave.

Once weaving is enabled, you’ll have to input the weaving parameters. This example was sourced from our documentation for weld settings, scroll down to the weave section for more details.

In addition to weave, you can also enable arc-seam tracking. Once again, after enabling this you’ll be required to input further weaving parameters, with the example shown also being sourced from our documentation.

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Weave Settings

Step 4 - Stitch

The final tab revealed with the advanced settings is stitch welding. Swap to the “stitch” process setting and navigate to the stitch tab. Here, we’ve enabled stitch and specified each of its parameters. The start and end offset let us indicate how far from each end the first weld of the stitch should start. We’ve specified 10mm for each of these.

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Stitch Settings

Finally, the last 2 parameters let us dictate how long each weld should be and how far apart these welds should be with the weld length and gap length respectively. Let’s click okay and select one of the welds with a length of 658mm. Set its process setting to the “stitch” setting. Now you should see the stitch weld applied to your part.

Regular Weld

Stitch

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