Many automated welding equipment are used in the industry. However, there are some problems to get quality welds because of the geometric error, thermal distortion, and incorrect joint fit-up. These factors can make the gap between base plates in case of a thick plate welding. The welding product with the quality welds can not be obtained without consideration of the gap. In this paper, the robot path and welding conditions are modified to get the quality weld by detecting the position and size of the gap. In this work, a low-priced laser range sensor is used. The 3-dimensional information is obtained using the motion of a robot, which holds a laser range sensor. The position and size of the gap is calculated using signal processing of the measured 3-dimensional information of joint profile geometry. The data measured by a laser range sensor is segmented by an iterative end point method. The segmented data is optimized by the least square method. The existence of gap is detected by comparing the data with the segmented shape of template. The effects of robot measuring speed and gap size are also tested. The recognizability fo the gap is verified as good by comparing the real joint profile and the calculated joint profile using the signal processing.