Research on robotic flexible welding path planning for transmission tower base joints

The reliance on manual teaching in high-mix low-volume (HMLV) transmission tower base joints manufacturing leads to inefficiencies, inconsistent weld quality, and high labor costs. This study presents a robotic flexible welding path planning approach to automatically generate welding paths for customized fabrication. The proposed method begins with arbitrary positioning of the workpiece on the turntable, followed by point cloud acquisition and weld seam extraction. Based on the extracted seam information, a turntable rotation strategy is implemented to determine the optimal welding position for each seam relative to the robot. A path planning algorithm incorporating Cartesian space constraints during sampling is then used to generate feasible welding paths. Finally, the resulting welding paths are transmitted to the robot for execution. To validate this approach, a path planning work platform integrated with a modular communication mechanism was established. The experimental results show that, compared to other algorithms, the method reduces average search time by up to 26.8% and average path length by up to 18.7%.