FPGA Based Sensor Integration and Communication Protocols for Automated Robot Control in Linear Welding

Electric arc welding is a complex task that is mainly hand-operated in shop floors nowadays. A high degree of process control is necessary to meet the international standards for fusion welding. Focused on this application case, we designed a camera interface that integrates a Terasic TRDB-D5M CMOS camera and an Altera DE0-Nano FPGA board which are used for image acquisition on a Vision-Based Measurement (VBM) system that executes on a computer. Given the board limitations in terms of memory, clock, and connectivity many features and protocols were developed from scratch. We present a system level modeling and synthesis and the integration to the whole digital linear welding system, using only 28% of the FPGA's slices. Results show the approach is a viable option to automate the process that is currently widely adopted in industry.