A novel visual guidance framework for robotic welding based on binocular cooperation

•An initial welding position guidance framework based on uncalibrated visual servoing and binocular cooperation is studied. The proposed method combines the advantages of passive and active vision sensors, and improves the flexibility of the vision system.•The global camera first controls the robot to approach the workpiece through the proposed EKF based uncalibrated visual servoing. Then, the derived cooperative motion equation will lead the robot towards the IWP.•2 The features extraction algorithms for realizing UVS are studied. The method to estimate the desired position of welding torch is discussed. And a compression strategy for Yolo-v4 is designed to realize real-time welding torch detection, which can be an optional solution for target detection tasks on computational-resource-limited devices.•The simulation experiments demonstrate the feasibility and stability of the proposed guidance framework. The comparison experiments indicate that the framework can increase the flexibility of the vision system while maintaining satisfactory accuracy.