10. Overview of Weld Settings

Tutorial

This tutorial covers the 4 types of settings available to adjust in the weld settings.

This tutorial is only a brief introduction and overview to these settings, and is the first of a series of tutorials explaining how you can specifically alter these settings to benefit your welding projects.

Prerequisites and Resources

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

Video Tutorial

Step by Step Guide

Step 1 - Process Settings

General Process Settings

Let’s start this tutorial by creating a new project and selecting the “yaskawa motoman example cell”. Once loaded into the project, we’ll navigate to the top ribbon and click on Weld Settings.

The first type of setting we’ll look at is the Weld Process Settings, so go ahead and click on Weld Process to select the setting type, then click the PLUS symbol to create a new settings profile.

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General Process Settings

On the right, you should now see all the available options, the general process settings allow you to:

  • Set a program ID

  • Adjust the welding speed

  • Adjusting additional stick-out

  • Define ranges and a optimal value for the travel and work angle.

Advanced Process Settings

We can also trigger the advanced settings by clicking on the blue text labelled Show advanced settings… which you can find at the bottom of the general options.

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Advanced Process Settings

These settings are much more specific and enable additional control of properties including:

  • Voltage

  • Current

  • Wire feed speed

  • Wire rotation.

This also will enable two additional tabs next to general, these being weave and tracking, and stitch:

  • Weave settings will allow you to enable the weaving weld technique for your robot, where you can then add weaving parameters, through-arc seam tracking and calibration limiting.

  • Stitch weld settings similarly allow you to enable your robot to stitch, where you can then specify offsets, weld lengths and gap lengths.

Weave and Tracking

Stitch

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Step 2 - Path Finding Settings

The next section of weld settings covers path finding and the methods in which your robot can perform path finding motions. While still in weld settings, select the path finding weld setting type then click the PLUS button to create a new path finding settings profile.

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General Path Finding Settings

To start, you’ll see a section labelled “general”. This section of settings is common across all types of path finding, of which its options include:

  • Specifying the accuracy of your parts measurements.

  • Select the type of surfaces able to be sensed.

  • Specify the spacing and sense distance.

In addition to these general options, there are also 3 types of path finding available to select. These being touch sense, 1D laser sense, and 2D laser sense (also known as profile sense). Each of these have unique options you can adjust, however touch sense and 1D laser sense do have a few common options:

Touch Sense and 1D Laser Sense Common Options

  • Limiting senses in 2 direction

  • Requiring sensing in 3 directions

  • Avoid sensing near welds

  • Avoid sensing near curved surfaces

  • Setting a maximum surface angle from search direction

1D Laser Sense Unique Options

  • Avoid reflections which may cause invalid sensor readings

  • Set a minimum incidence angle

Note

Due to the complexity of 2D laser sense, its options will be covered entirely in its own tutorial.

Step 3 - Workpiece Positioner Settings

The next set of settings we’ll look at are the “workpiece positioner settings”. This type of weld setting lets us specify how the workpiece positioner is to move during welding. Once again, let’s select the workpiece positioner type and select the plus button.

The workpiece positioner options consist of:

  • Disabling workpiece positioner movement during welding

  • Locking the positioner to a specific location

  • Limiting the positioner to only valid positions within a specified range

  • Limiting the positioner to any position within a specified range

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Workpiece Positioner Settings

These modes all directly affect the movement of the positioner.

Step 4 - Robot Positioner Settings

The 4th and final section of the weld settings looks at the options regarding the robot positioner. In weld settings, select the robot positioner setting type, then one again click the plus button to create a robot positioner setting. These settings directly control how the robot positioner moves during welding. Similar to the workpiece positioner settings, once again we have 4 modes of movement we can specify for the positioner. However, an additional option we have is to limit movement to only one side of the weld. These options being:

  • Allow movement

  • Do not move

  • Lock to a specific value

  • Lock relative to current weld motion

  • Limit to only be positioned on the positive/negative side of the weld

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Robot Positioner Settings

These options can also be used to have a unique effect on gantry cells, however this will be covered in detail in the robot positioner tutorial.