Application of Industrial Robot to Welded Pipe Production

Described here in the paper are the industrial robots as used in the weld pipe production line separately for automatic weld grinding,pipe comprehensive measurement and automatic pipe spray-marking.Analysis are made on the effectiveness of the said robots as taking over the original manual operations.The analysis shows that the robot performing auto-grinding of the tube-end weld is capable of firstly identifying the weld characteristics,and determining the grinding trajectory, and then grinding both the internal and external welds; the robot for pipe comprehensive measurement is capable of automatic measurement of data of the finished steel pipe such as pipe-end bevel,oblique cutting, diameter, roundness and circumference, etc.; and the robot for automatic spray-marking is capable of automatic spraying information like measured weight and dimensions,and other identifications as required on both inner and outer surfaces of the pipe end.Thanks to employment of these three kinds of robots,the operation costs of the production line can be remarkably reduced,and thus competitiveness of the producer shall be enhanced.