7. Weld Management

Tutorial

This tutorial looks at the management of pre-existing welds in your projects, and the various management functions available for you to use.

Prerequisites and Resources

Before starting with the tutorial, ensure to have the ABB FlexArc example cell downloaded and imported into Verbotics Weld. This cell is available to download from the examples page on our website, or through the Example Cells tab found in the new project dialogue.

This tutorial also uses the Weld Management example project which can be downloaded here.

Video Tutorial

Timestamps:

• 0:00 Start
• 0:15 Introduction
• 0:43 Step 1: Copying Welds
• 1:15 Step 1a: Copy Welds Along a Direction
• 2:17 Step 1b: Copy Welds by Rotating Around an Axis
• 3:49 Step 1c: Mirror Welds Across a Plane
• 4:23 Step 2: Renaming Welds
• 5:57 Step 3: Sorting Welds

Step by Step Guide

Step 1 - Copying Welds

Verbotics Weld’s Copy function has 3 options when it comes to copying welds, which we’ll explore one by one, starting with the first option “copy along a direction”.

Copy Along a Direction

Select the weld labelled “Straight Weld” from the welds tab. You’ll see this weld covers a short section of the parts straight, long edge. We want an additional 2 short welds along this length. With the “Straight Weld” still selected, right click the weld and then click Copy.

Copy Button in the Context Menu

The window that opens is the copy function. For this weld, we want to select the option Along a direction. Now, we can select the options to copy our weld as we want it.

Copy Welds Window

1. We want 3 welds total, so we’ll set the number of copies to 2.

2. As the path travels along the positive X direction, we’ll also want to select +X.

3. We need to specify how far each copy should be spaced. As the length of the original weld is 220mm, and we also want a small gap in between each weld, we’ll set with spacing to be 222mm.

Now click OK to successfully copy the weld along this straight direction.

Before	After

Rotated Around an Axis

For curved welds revolving around a point, we’ll need to use a different copy option. Go ahead and right-click “Curved Weld” from the welds widget, then open the copy function. This time, select Rotated around an axis as the copy option. With this, we copy the “Curved Weld” around the base of the cylinder.

Original Single Curved Weld

Before we can copy, we once again need to select and specify all the necessary options and values:

1. We need to specify the axis centre, which is the point to rotate the weld around. The cylinders centre is located at an X value of -303.44mm, so enter that into the centre value.

2. Specify the axis direction, which we want each value to be 0, except for Z which should be 1.

3. Set the angle between copies to -90 degrees, which we can do by disabling automatically calculate and updating the final value.

Click OK, and now we can see the weld has been copied around the base.

Rotated Around Axis Options and Generated Copy

Mirror Across a Plane

At this point, you may have noticed that all our welds only exist on one side of the part, but we’d like these welds to be placed on both sides. Go ahead and select all of our current welds, and once again open the copy function. Select the Mirrored across a plane option.

For this copy mode, all we have to do is set Y to 1, telling Verbotics Weld to mirror across the Y plane. Click OK, and we have successfully mirrored all our welds onto the other side of the part.

Mirror Welds Options and Generated Copies

Step 2 - Renaming Welds

With all these new copied welds, many of our welds share names. We could go through and manually right click and rename everyone weld like this. However, for project with hundreds of welds this is repetitive and tedious, so instead we’ll use the built-in bulk renaming function.

Start by selecting all the welds labelled “straight”, then right clicking and select Bulk Rename. In this dialogue box, we can specify a name to classify all these welds as, then verbotics will number each one automatically. Let’s enter a name then click OK.

Bulk Renaming Function

While bulk naming is useful, we may have welds which we want to specify have special properties. For our example project, we want to specify the front facing, and rear facing welds without changing their names to do so. For this, we can use the tags feature in the details widget. Go ahead and select all the front facing welds, then in the tags box type “front”. Upon hitting enter, all of our front facing welds can now be seen having that extra classification as a front facing weld.

Creating and Adding a “Front” Tag for the Selected Welds

Step 3 - Sorting Welds

Sorting welds is an essential step to ensuring your weld program is completed efficiently. The order of the welds shown in the welds widget is the order they will be completed in once exported to your robot.

Sorting these welds into specific orders can allow you to reduce excessive robot and positioner movement.

Additionally, you can order your program in such a way that essential welds that hold your assembly together are completed first, allowing workpiece positioners to move your assembly without risking parts shifting out of position.

At this stage, our welds are being completed in the order they were created in. To speed up our program, let’s sort our welds. Select all of the welds, then right-click and select Sort Welds to open the sorting menu.

Sort Welds Menu

The sorting menu allows you to define a list of sorts to perform on your welds. The priority of the sort depends on its position in the table.

For example, if we were to set row 1 to sort our welds by their X position, then we set row 2 to sort the welds by their Y position, the selected welds would primarily be sorted based on their X position. However, any welds with the same X position would then be sorted by their Y position.

The sort welds function has several options when it comes to ordering your welds. Visit the Sort Welds reference page here for details on each of these options.

Sort Welds Options

In addition to these sorting options, there is also the alternate welds across a plane option which takes the sorted welds on two sides of a symmetrical plane and alternates them.

Alternate option for Sorting Welds

For this example, let’s apply a single sort using the position along axis Y criteria. If you now click on the 3D viewer of our project without closing Sort Welds, you can see a visual representation of your new weld order.

Visual Preview of New Weld Order

For your own projects make sure to identify and use the option that best suits your project, as sorting your welds in the optimal order can help to reduce the time taken to complete welding programs.