SurfMotion: An Open Source Pipeline for Robotic Pipe Cutting and Welding

Abstract

Robotic pipe cutting and welding are examples of precise surface-conforming tasks for manipulator robots. Though they are commonplace industrial processes, they pose difficult technical challenges, particularly in motion planning and execution on complex geometries. Existing solutions are largely proprietary, expensive, and closely tied to specific hardware platforms, while open-source alternatives are limited in scope and integration. This thesis introduces SurfMotion, a ROS package developed to begin to bridge the gap between open-source and proprietary solutions for surface-conforming robotic tasks. SurfMotion provides a modular pipeline for generating, projecting and executing geometry-aware Cartesian trajectories on complex surfaces. The package integrates surface processing, path projection, inverse kinematics feasbility checking, and robot-agnostic trajectory execution, leveraging the ROS 2 and MoveIt frameworks. The effectiveness of SurfMotion is demonstrated and quantified in terms of Cartesian space error, velocity consistency, and overall smoothness of motion execution through simulated robotic cutting and welding tasks across four example robot models (UR5, UR20, Fanuc m10ia and Kuka iiwa14). Experimental results show that two of the MoveIt motion execution frameworks integrated achieve sub-millimeter accuracy in path tracking.