Ship manufacturing has been regarded as a labour intensive process which does not lend itself to easy automation. To increase productivity and improve working conditions at the shipyard, a significant amount of effort has been made for automating the manufacturing procedure. Many processes have been automated fully and partially but there exists no automatic line heating system which is ready to use in practice since it involves a lot of theoretical and practical issues. Researchers in various countries tried to find reasonable solutions to the automation. But they failed to provide appropriate automation software and hardware in a comprehensive manner since most of the solutions developed so far require excessive computation time, can yield only the forming information for one cycle of fabrication, or are not satisfactory in terms of productivity and efficiency. In this paper, we present an automatic line heating system which can be used in the ship manufacturing process. We enhanced software for heating information calculation, triangle heating and geometrical assessments and incorporated it into the hardware consisting of a measuring machine and a high frequency induction heating machine, all of which are synchronized to make a complete automatic line heating system. We demonstrate our system with steel plates that are actually used in ship manufacturing and show that the system fabricates the desired shape successfully. The automation system proposed in this paper is developed considering the field workers' fabrication process, so it can be employed in many other shipyards with minimum modification.
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