This study introduces the web-camera image processing-based natural landmark extraction method for automatic welding using 3-axis stage. The welding is a highly significant process in the industries of shipbuilding, automobile, construction, machinery, and so on. However, it has been avoided due to poor working conditions such as fume, spatter, noise, and so on. For the automatic welding system, the web-camera is used to extract the natural landmarks which can give the relative coordinate to set up the initial position of the stage for the welding process. The Canny edge and Hough transformation have been used to extract the significant points for the natural landmark extraction in this paper.

The localization of the robot is one of the most important factors of navigating mobile robots. The use of featured information of landmarks is one approach to estimate the location of the robot. This approach can be classified into two categories: the natural-landmark-based and artificial-landmark-based approach. Natural landmarks are suitable for any environment, but they may not be sufficient for localization in the less featured or dynamic environment. On the other hand, artificial landmarks may generate shaded areas due to space constraints. In order to improve these disadvantages, this paper presents a novel development of the localization system by using artificial and natural-landmarks-based approach on a topological map. The proposed localization system can recognize far or near landmarks without any distortion by using landmark tracking system based on top-view image transform. The camera is rotated by distance of landmark. The experiment shows a result of performing position recognition without shading section by applying the proposed system with a small number of artificial landmarks in the mobile robot.