*Article* **Design and Test of Duckbill Welding Robot for Cotton Seeder**

**Yu Ren 1,2, Wensong Guo 1,2,\*, Xufeng Wang 1,2, Can Hu 1,2, Long Wang 1,2, Xiaowei He 1,2 and Jianfei Xing 1,2**


**Abstract:** To improve the automation, welding efficiency, and welding quality of duckbill welding of the cotton seeder, this study designed a cotton seeder duckbill welding robot. According to the characteristics of the duckbill weldment and welding requirements, the overall structure of the welding robot was determined, including the girdle feeding mechanism, static duckbill feeding mechanism, hinge feeding mechanism, welding fixture, welding actuator, and control system. To realize the continuous automatic feeding, positioning, fixing, welding, and unloading of the workpiece in the duckbill welding, the feeding mechanism adopts the method of cooperative cooperation of inductive proximity switch, electromagnet, and cylinder. The main body of the welding fixture adopts the pneumatic clamping method; the welding actuator adopts the synchronous belt module electric drive so that the welding torch can move in a straight line along the X axis and the Z axis. The welding process of the duckbill was simulated by Simufact Welding software, and the deformation and stress changes of the weldment were compared and analyzed when the single-sided single welding, the bilateral symmetrical double welding torch, two welding forms, and two welding process parameters were used to determine the welding process parameters of the welding robot. The prototype was made and the welding test was carried out. The test results show that the duckbill welding robot of the cotton seeder has stable feeding, solid clamping, accurate positioning, and high welding efficiency. According to the national standard, the appearance of the duckbill weld is inspected. The surface of the duckbill weld and the heat-affected zone has no cracks, incomplete fusion, slag inclusion, crater, and porosity. The forming quality of the welded parts is good. The design of the duckbill welding robot for cotton seeder is helpful in solving the problems of cumbersome positioning and clamping and low efficiency in manual and semi-automatic duckbill welding robots, which provides a strong guarantee for the large-scale and standardized welding production of the dibbler duckbill.

**Keywords:** cotton seeder; duckbill; Simufact Welding; welding robot; automated welding

**Citation:** Ren, Y.; Guo, W.; Wang, X.; Hu, C.; Wang, L.; He, X.; Xing, J. Design and Test of Duckbill Welding Robot for Cotton Seeder. *Agriculture* **2023**, *13*, 31. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/agriculture13010031

Academic Editors: Jin Yuan, Wei Ji and Qingchun Feng

Received: 21 November 2022 Revised: 9 December 2022 Accepted: 20 December 2022 Published: 22 December 2022

**Copyright:** © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).
