Abstract

Ultrasonic welding of thermoplastics has become an important industrial manufacturing process in the fields of aerospace and transportation. High quality standards are demanded and a reliable quality assessment routine is fundamental. Most on-site and off-site approaches are time consuming or require additional active illumination. Especially temperature models have proven to be good indicators for welding quality. We present a methodology to measure the surface temperature in real-time and visualize it simultaneously as a 3D model. Through augmenting a stereo camera system with an additional passive thermal infrared camera, we are able to map the heat data of multiple successive welds of large, free-form structures into a common 3D data representation. A challenging calibration approach is used to derive the inner and exterior orientation for the trifocal camera system. Geometric and radiometric improvements for an aluminium chessboard allow the usage of wide-angle optics for the thermal infrared camera. Consequently, we verify the quality of each camera by means of their resolving power. Therefore, a Siemens star test pattern is used for the thermal camera as well. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our methodology on a robot-guided ultrasonic welding tool.