Budget $35,000–$280,000 depending on configuration. A basic cobot starts at the low end; a fully equipped gantry with 3D vision and dual robots sits at the top. Most rail-mounted systems with teachless programming land between $55,000 and $90,000.

The five types are: rail-mounted traveling-rail grounded weld-seam robots for long welds on H-beams; cantilever airborne-traveling-rail suspended work-piece bots for batch-loaded work; gantry portal-frame-based on up-to 5m-spread large-plate work on big shipbuilding parts; drag-teachable, light-weighted joint-collaborative-robots (cobots) for going into tight ship-yard places; and intelligent work-stations with hollow-arm internal wiring for "hostile" productioncells.

While a traditional industrial welding robot runs on a high speed a fenced safety cell and is programmable using a teach pendant or offline software, a welding cobot (collaborative robot) is designed for operation in close proximity to a human operator, with no fencing required. cobots are both lighter and easier to move between workstations than traditional industrial robots and are programmed using a drag-and-teach - the programmer physically guides the arm through the design once and the cobot can repeat the process accurately. The down-side is that they move much more slowly than typical industrial robots in order to maintain safety so are suitable for low to medium volume, high-mix assembly rather than dedicated, high-volume lines.

Yes. The teachless systems receive 3D CAD files directly from Tekla or SolidWorks and detect the positions of weld seams and produce the welding path automatically, requiring no pendant programming.

Largest market for steel structural fabrications - H-beams, columns and plate assemblies with large quantities of repetitive fillet welds. Ship building yards: gantry and cobot systems for hull panels, deck sections and bulk head work. Bridge builders and power equipment manufacturers transformers tanks, switch gear enclosures using robotic welding cells. Any job on steel plate over 3 mm welding repetitive joints.

The other major real-world limitation is fit-up tolerance. A welding robot tight-tack'edponents needs to be within a couple mm of their designated starting points (program input data). Your tack-up can be off that much, but the robot will then either never find a joint or burn through it, so your upstream cutting, drilling and assembly tolerances will have to be a good deal tighter than they might normally be for manual welding. Further, your applications should generally be for high-volume, static work: doing 20 unique jobs with 20 different joint geometries is probably not worth the programming time.

For a typical rail-mounted or cantilever system commissioning and start-up can take between 5-10 working days including rail straightening, robot calibration, welding parameters adjustment and operator instruction. A teachless system with offline programming can have first production weld within three days of power-on as there is no manual teach-pendant programming. gantry systems take longer – up to 15 days for the structural steelwork for the portal frame.

The robots and computers provide the breathing space, the heavy lifting—which means running 200 identical fillet welds on H-beam stiffeners for example. But the experienced welder wthdesignated for fit-up evaluation, fixture design, quality inspection and countless judgment calls will still be needed on every busy fab shop. The real difference in the welder's job is that he or she will not have a hand in every single job on the floor: for Robothe will operate two or three cells, solve seam-tracking problems and weld the irregular joints that cannot (or should not) be automated.

Most industrial welding robotes during their main process use GMAW (MIG/MAG) as it has the optimum balance of speed, penetration and wire-feed automation. Robotic GTAW (TIG) is also fairly widespread for thin-wall or critical joints where low spatter is required while high visual quality is desirable. Other supported processes are for FCAW (flux-cored arc welding) for heavy structural item, SAW (submerged arc welding) for long straight seams and robotic laser welding for accurate joints on thin gauge material.

Start by asking three questions. First: how long is your maximum weld in a single pass? That's your rail length or gantry span-a 12m H-beam requires an entirely different system than a 2m support bracket. Second: what is your batch size? If you make hundreds of the same component then a dedicated rail-mounted station is worth its weight in saved scheduling time. If you changeover every seven days then consider a cobot or teachless station with offline programming so you don't spend long hours dragging clamps and prising jigs. Third: how much floor area can you afford to give up? cantilever robots operate overhead and leave the ground clear for crane loading. cobots moves on wheels and clamps magnetically, impacting zero permanent cost. Once you've figured those three out then your choice of reach and payload capacity can be guided by your thickest material and most frequent joint pattern. Send us your workpiece drawings and we'll go from there.