Welding is essential for the manufacture of a range of engineering components which may vary from very large structures such as ships and bridges to very complex structures such as aircraft engines, or miniature components for microelectronic applications. Especially, a domestic situation of the welding automation is still depend on the arc sensing system in comparison to the vision sensing system. Specially, the gap-detecting of workpiece using conventional arc sensor is proposed in this study. As a same principle, a welding current varies with the size of a welding gap. This study introduce to the fuzzy membership filter to cancel a high frequency noise of welding current, and ART2 which has the competitive learning network classifies the signal patterns the filtered welding signal. A welding current possesses a specific pattern according to the existence or the size of a welding gap. These specific patterns result in different classification in comparison with an occasion for no welding gap. The patterns in each case of 1mm, 2mm, 3mm and no welding gap are identified by the artificial neural network.