We have been building robotic cells for welding for 30 years. Robotic welding has many advantages over dedicated welding systems. The advantages include greater flexibility in welding different parts in the same fixture, ease of adapting the weld path to new parts and easier to set up safe areas in the machine while the robot is still in motion. There is no limit to the number of different parts you can weld. Some disadvantages are usually the robotic cells have slower through-put and they often are more costly than a dedicated cell like a Rotary welder. The biggest issues we encounter is that customers have a hard time finding a qualified robot technician, on their staff, to maintain a robot cell.
Robotic weld stations utilize tooling to precisely position your part, whether it is manually loaded into the fixture or you use material handling to automatically load. After welding your part can be manually unloaded or it can be equipped with a fixture mounted eject mechanism. Once the assembly is unclamped it could be automatically transferred from the fixture tooling to a staging area. This would allow the operator to load the parts for the next weld cycle without having to first remove the previously welded assembly.
General Options on Robotic Machines
- Safety features such as Arc shield curtains, area scanners, safety light curtains, Robot defined safe zones
- Torch Oscillation – (known as weave) is available for a wider weld for multiple layer parts
- Barcode scanner
- Vision systems
- Adaptive torch gauging
Single-Station
Two-Station
