A CCD camera with a laser stripe was applied to realize the automatic weld seam tracking in GMAW. It takes relatively long time to process image on-line control using the basic Hough transformation, but it has a tendency of robustness over the noises such as spatter and arc light. For this reason, it was complemented with adaptive Hough transformation to have an on-line processing ability for scanning specific weld points. The adaptive Hough transformation was used to extract laser stripes and to obtain specific weld points. The 3-dimensional information obtained from the vision system made it possible to generate the weld torch path and to obtain the information such as width and depth of weld line. In this study, a neural network based on the generalized delta rule algorithm was adapted for the process control of GMA, such as welding speed, arc voltage and wire feeding speed.
