Welding wire is a major type of welding consumable, which needs to be winded onto spools for sale. Currently, the winding process is accomplished manually due to obstacles such as automatic spool loading and clamping. When loading the spool, the angular position of the spool is a prerequisite for matching the drive rod on the spindle and drive bore on the spool. Therefore, this paper proposes a template-matching method combined with area-based matching and feature-point detection to measure the angular position of the spool, and presents a mechanical system that can rotate the spool to match the drive rod and push the spool onto the spindle. A novel feature-point distribution density (FPDD) method was developed to accelerate the matching process and improve matching reliability by pre-locating the searching area. The robustness and accuracy of the template-matching-based measuring method were validated using a built prototype of the mechanical system. The comparison result shows that the proposed method was superior in robustness, accuracy, and speed, and it was efficient for automatic spool loading in the welding wire winding process.

中文翻译：

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机械系统和基于模板匹配的焊丝绕线筒自动定位和加载位置测量方法

焊丝是焊接材料的主要类型，需要将其缠绕到线轴上进行销售。当前，由于诸如自动线轴加载和夹紧的障碍，卷绕过程是手动完成的。在加载线轴时，线轴的角位置是匹配主轴上的驱动杆和线轴上的驱动孔的先决条件。因此，本文提出了一种模板匹配方法，结合基于区域的匹配和特征点检测来测量阀芯的角位置，并提出了一种机械系统，该系统可以旋转阀芯以匹配驱动杆并将阀芯推入主轴。开发了一种新颖的特征点分布密度（FPDD）方法，通过预先定位搜索区域来加快匹配过程并提高匹配可靠性。使用机械系统的原型，验证了基于模板匹配的测量方法的鲁棒性和准确性。对比结果表明，该方法在鲁棒性，准确性和速度方面均具有优越性，并且对于焊丝缠绕过程中自动线轴加载是有效的。