A turn in the welding robotics community
/In early October in Denver, Colorado, the American Welding Society (AWS) held the first Automated Welding & Sensors Conference. This is a follow up to the prior National Robotic Arc Welding Conference, which last took place in 2019, but was not an official AWS conference. Since then, a lot has changed. One change is a pivot to acknowledging there is a lot going on in robotics, sensors, human robot interaction, and emerging trends in workforce education and sustainment, that it makes sense to have a conference on automation in welding.
The venue and a full house for the first official American Welding Society Automated Welding & Sensors Conference
Full disclosure, I cut my teeth and bare many scars by implementing robotic welding, on large structures, where quality was paramount, and input variation was prevalent. I also spent many hours on precision sheet metal assemblies, that also had high quality requirements, and interesting material combinations. Robotics enabled repeatability, and a means to ensure quality when we had our processes under control, but the robotic systems of the early to mid-2000s had their limitations. My journey to further robotic welding capability and performance during my time in industry working for Caterpillar led working with tools such as ROS, and subsequently getting involved in the ROS-Industrial open-source project and consortium.
Fast forward, and there are still challenges. There are also a lot of new tools, innovations, new voices with new ideas, and plenty of examples of applying technology in a sustainable way to realize gains for small and medium enterprises. First and foremost was the prevalence of collaborative robots, in particular Universal Robots power and force limited manipulators. The conference was organized by Vectis Automation founder and CEO Doug Rhoda and his team, in partnership with Jeff Noruk of ServoRobot.
Some of the key takeaways from my perspective is there is a hunger for intelligent yet easy to use solutions. There is an inherent high mix, and, at times, harsh environment. It is now at the point where collaborative robots – power and force limited manipulators – are now appearing in several job shops, and large manufacturers around the world. Caterpillar shared their experience in taking advantage of leveraging collaborative hardware-based systems to realize flexible and agile welding capability.
Caterpillar’s Don Stickel sharing industry technological needs
Furthermore, there have been advances in welding data management, which has been a growth area for those passionate about welding quality and the wealth of “big data,” that can be harvested from welding operations. In parallel, there has been significant advances in the ability to monitor with camera systems to richly visualize the welding process. The arc, molten pool, the filler metal/electrode and perform real-time vision analysis to close the loop, beyond historically simply the electrical signals previously leveraged.
Advances in leveraging mobility were shared, and digital technologies, making their way into the welding equipment, are giving the welding industry a lot to pull into their operations. However, there is still further opportunity to support the welding domain through implementation and scaling of AI-based capabilities. This could be for low-level real-time control, such as what Novarc shared during their talk, or the ability for higher level weldment process planning to be more robust in AI generalization, to scale across classes of fabrications more efficiently.
The growth in robotics has been well documented in many domains such as warehouse and logistics, on-road autonomy, drone-based inspection, and monitoring through legged robots performing various tasks in dynamic environments.
There is an opportunity for all the contributors in the robotics domain to learn about the needs, challenges, and opportunities within the materials joining community. While often labeled as dirty, dull, and dangerous, there is both a need via the well-documented labor shortage, and a technical challenge to establish advanced approaches to make the products of tomorrow right here where they will be consumed.
It was great to see the progress in the welding community, relative to adopting technology and aligning tech capability with the needs of this end-user community. Let’s keep supporting these communities, and continue further for the coating industry, forging and casting as well, again to support the ability to make products efficiently where they are consumed. Not just to advance technology for the sake of technology but to build the ecosystem for a more resilient economy and supply chain for the next generation. The ROS-I open-source project aims to provide utilities that serve as building blocks for these sorts of initiatives, and we look forward to seeing how they get onto the shop floor.