Industrial Automation’s Biggest Challenges: Welding in Complex Environments

Forget “Where’s Waldo?” The question fab shops and metalworking businesses are asking is “Where’s my welder?” Welding robots can help and they are more advanced and easier to deploy than ever before. Welding automation giants and A3 members OTC DAIHEN, Inc. and Cloos Robotic Welding, Inc. share their insights on some of these advancements.

Where’s my Welder?

The American Welding Society estimates that 330,000 welders will be needed by 2028, with an average of just 82,500 welding jobs being filled annually from 2024–2028. Complicating the situation further, 21.4% of welders in the United States are 55 years old or older.

Meanwhile, noting that approximately 70% of all manufactured products require the skills of welders, market analyst firm McKinsey estimates that in approximately 10 years, just 2.7% of welder jobs filled in 2022 are likely to be considered “job keepers,” a finding the authors attribute to churn and retirement.

Robotic welding systems help companies fill these labor gaps, while simultaneously increasing throughput and productivity, reducing waste, and improving quality. Further, depending on the type of deployment, welding robots can be introduced in a way that enhances ergonomics for current welding staff, enabling companies to keep their existing welders — if they are lucky enough to have welders, of course.

Welding robots have been used for decades, but they have evolved greatly over recent years in terms of the types of complex welding applications they can perform, the materials they can work with, the size of parts they can work on, their ease of use, and their overall mobility. They must be hardy to withstand complex welding environments full of particulate matter, but they must be user-friendly too to enable quick and easy redeployments.

Simulation Software for Welding

Software that enables end users to quickly design and program the best robot welding solution for their application is one of the most impactful developments in the past decade, says Mike Monnin, sales director at CLOOS Robotic Welding, Inc., a subsidiary of welding giant CLOOS.

Founded in Germany in 1919, CLOOS developed its first welding robot — for gas shielded arc welding — in 1978, started in-house robot production in 1981, and developed its first robot controller in 1986.

More recently, the company launched its ExperT product line, an ecosystem of automation components, welding and software for creating and deploying purpose-built robotic welding systems. The web-based ExperT configurator allows users to construct a robot welder using plug & play CLOOS power sources, robots, and automation components. The configurator has built-in knowledge of what components work together, making it impossible to combine incompatible components together, says Monnin.  

“Our ExperT configurator is like a software Lego kit of welding robot parts and components. It allows you to easily build the system you want from the ground up and its in-built intelligence about welding ensures better designs and shorter deployment times,” explains Monnin.

The company’s simulation software can be used to generate welding path data directly based on CAD data, eliminating a lot of time-consuming programming tasks and delivering a better experience to end-users.

“Letting CAD define where the weld paths are going to be eliminates an awful lot of manual programming. If I'm welding into a right-angle corner, for example, I can click those two weld joints and our software recognizes that it's a corner and that there's going to be an issue trying to maintain a push angle so it defines the weld path, accordingly. Essentially, the simulation software does the programming for you in a couple of clicks.”  

When CLOOS first entered the robot welding space, welding robots had to be highly customized for each application.

“We still develop customized solutions, but we’ve taken the knowledge we gained across thousands of customized deployments and brought it back down to modular concepts,” explains Adam Moore, business development manager at CLOOS Robotic Welding, Inc.

Cold welding is a solid-state joining process which, unlike most welding tasks, doesn’t involve melting. Robotic cold welding systems use precise mechanical pressure control to bond metals and they are being deployed more commonly due to advancements in robotics and sensor technology.   

One of CLOOS’ customers, Matyssek Metalltechnik deployed welding automation to perform cold welds during a hood manufacturing process involving thin plates.

Consisting of two stations and a 7-axis welding robot mounted on a linear track, the robot can be easily guided around corners or into niches. The increased deposition rate of the cold weld process provided an enormous increase in welding speeds to the customer versus traditional methods. And since the material is exposed to minimal heat, its original material properties remain largely unchanged, reducing any reworking requirements to a minimum. 

Enhanced Arc Control

Founded in 1919 in Osaka, Japan, welding giant OTC DAIHEN started developing welding power sources in the 1930s and launched its first robot welders in the 1970s.

“We’ve been pioneering new technologies ever since,” says Chris Sharp, general manager, sales and marketing at OTC DAIHEN. “We innovated technologies that are commonplace in the robotic welding arena today, including synchronized motion and DC Wave Pulse welding.”

​​​​​​​Synchronized motion refers to the ability to synchronize a robot with an external positioner while continuously welding, so you can move the part and weld at the same time.

DC Wave Pulse is an advanced welding technique that uses direct current (DC) combined with a pulsed waveform to achieve precise control over the heat input and metal transfer during welding tasks. The technique is often used in applications requiring high-quality welds, minimal heat distortion, and greater control over the weld pool.

OTC DAIHEN provides a range of robotic welding cells, arc welding robots (including newly launched collaborative robot welders) and accessories, power sources, and complete, ready-to-ship systems.

The company’s SynchroFeed technology, for example, uses precise wire guide synchronization to eliminate welding spatter, says Sharp.

“With every pulse of the arc, the wire is extended and retracted at a very high frequency. This allows the robot to ignite the arc and retract the wire to increase the arc length. Then, right before that droplet of wire falls into the puddle creating spatter, the robot extends the wire back into the puddle to extinguish the arc, all at a really high rate of speed,” Sharp explains.  

OTC DAIHEN has invested heavily in the design of user-friendly, collaborative welding robots that require very little programming to deploy. “The intent here is that you don't have to be a programming expert. You just need to know the proper torch angle and stick-out along with the correct weld parameters,” says Sharp.  

Heavy Duty Welding

Today’s welding robots can also easily take on seriously heavy-duty welding tasks that would have been beyond their capabilities a decade ago.

Traditionally, heavy-duty welds have been performed using submerged arc welding (SAW) techniques. SAW involves the creation of a molten weld pool beneath a granular flux, which protects the weld from atmospheric contamination and stabilizes the arc. SAW is widely used in the ship building and bridge construction sectors.

Buried Arc Welding (BAW), a new welding technique developed at OTC, takes heavy-duty SAW-based welding robots to another level.

BAW relies on “burying” the welding arc deeper into the weld pool and the base material. This means faster deposition rates and a reduction in the number of common defects like undercutting or lack of fusion that can occur using standard SAW methods.  

The Right Mix

Marion, Indiana-based custom fabricator Wiley Metal Fabricating deployed the OTC DAIHEN Robotic Weld System on arc welding jobs and saw improved quality, less waste and splatter, and reduced gas costs.

“Many companies are adding helium or oxygen to their mix to eliminate spatter and increase penetration. With mild steel there's no reason they need to have tri mix gas on their premises and mix it themselves,” says Sharp.

Meanwhile, Colombus-based First Metals & Plastics Inc. went from a fixed table solution on its old robots to a parts positioner with a head and tail stock solution via a new system from OTC. The transition to OTC welding automation enabled First Metals to perform full 360 degree welds, to position parts with fewer operations, and to get into locations that were impossible to access with traditional fixed table robots. The resulting boom in throughput and productivity enabled the First Metals to provide higher quality, higher volume, and more consistency to its customers.

Future Trends in Robotic Welding

Monitoring software for robot welding cells is a trend that’s set to grow over the coming years, says CLOOS’ Moore.

“Monitoring software has been advancing and tying into more equipment, enabling you to monitor everything from production statistics to recognizing failure trends earlier, so you can warn people and prevent unexpected robot downtime in advance.”

In addition, Moore expects to see technologies that enable seam tracking — standard on CLOOS welding robots — to increase in popularity.

Offline programming based on digital twins and simulations is set to become more widespread, says OTC DAIHEN’s Sharp, although it is already available on OTC products.

“Once the system has been installed, you can do a simple backup and import it into the software very quickly. The robot knows where the external positioners are, and through a couple of touch offs, it knows where your fixture and your part are. Then, as you develop programs offline, you can download them to your robot,” says Sharp.