Faced with labor shortages and quality issues associated with manual welding processes, West Coast Mfg., a CNC machine shop serving the commercial dishwasher industry in the United States and Canada, joined a growing number of companies to deploy a collaborative robotic laser welding solution.
“We had quality issues, and we had production issues,” says Patrick Hundley, president of West Coast Mfg.
The deployment, which meant switching from the company’s manual TIG welding process, enabled West Coast Mfg. to quadruple its welding output while simultaneously improving quality and reducing waste.
The West Coast Mfg. facility has a dual-station laser welding setup, incorporating two welding tables with an industrial cobot in the middle, which enables work on multiple fixtures on the same table.
“Operators can load one fixture, hit a button and get the next operation ready to go while the robot is laser welding the part,” says Bryan Montez, plant manager.
Manual TIG welding often caused issues with thinner materials and smaller diameter parts, where excess heat led to warping and rework.
“Robotic laser welding is, in some cases, four times better, and there are just certain things that manual welding can’t do,” Montez says. “Laser welding has really helped us there. We save a lot of time post-processing the parts, and there’s a lot more efficiency moving out the door after the parts are welded.”
West Coast Mfg. has already purchased two additional collaborative robotic laser welders.
Rise of laser welding
Laser welding is growing in popularity due to technological advancements, particularly with the rise of effective, affordable handheld lasers. These products are rising in demand in the automotive, aerospace, electronics, medical device and precision manufacturing sectors.
Using a focused beam of light to enable fine welds with tight tolerances and welding of thin materials, laser welding is extremely fast and produces less heat than traditional welding methods. This leads to less post-processing due to warping of materials, making it a preferred choice over alternatives like MIG and TIG welding across many applications.
Laser welding is also automation-friendly as most leading handheld laser welders integrate well with robotics and CNC systems. The global robotics laser welding market, which was valued at $1.5 billion in 2023, is expected to double in value by 2032.
In recent years, collaborative robotic laser welding solutions have entered the market. Built on an industrial cobot platform, these solutions combine the advantages of laser welding with the benefits of cobots.
A new era
Cobots are industrial robots, but this is a new era of industrial automation, one that has been driven in large part by advancements in usability and safety that originated in the cobot space. Cobots are not merely a rehash of existing automation. They provide a fresh look at usability, portability and general ease of use to the customer.
Cobots do not have the same “feel” as traditional welding robots. For starters, they have user-friendly interfaces and are easy to program and reprogram, which lowers the barrier to adoption, especially at companies with little or no previous robotics experience. For operators that make a mistake when programming, the force-torque feedback sensors inside a cobot can be used to safely stop it before damaging tooling or injuring an employee – something that can happen when making a mistake programming a traditional robot.
Traditional automation still has its place, particularly for larger payloads, but in many applications, adopting collaborative automation does not mean giving up any advantages. In fact, cobots are ideal for fabrication applications like laser welding, which often involves frequent part changeovers.
Safety assessment requirements do not affect whether to use a traditional welding robot or a collaborative robotic laser welder. The same precautions, such as a laser welding safety enclosure, need to be thought through so operators stay safe and the robot application is de-risked.
This means thinking about the automation risk assessment, the PPE required by operators and the safety protocols. While companies have freedom in terms of how they deploy laser welding technologies, they should be very cautious about circumventing safety protocols that are built into laser equipment.
Different cobot brands offer different functionality, including on the safety side, so it is important to explore what the cobot brings to the table, especially the range of safety features it provides that assist with reducing risks in the automation application.
On the programming side, different brands also vary in terms of programming ease and the degree of adaptation to a specific welding application. Some cobot brands are more mature in their capabilities because their manufacturers have been doing it longer and are just better at it.
Cutting edge
Because of the user-friendly interface and usability, a collaborative robotic laser welder can be up and running in a fraction of the time compared to traditional automation. High-mix/low-volume production is not impossible using traditional automation, but it is a lot slower and harder.
In this new era of collaborative automation, the operator simply organizes the parts, tooling and fixturing and then reprograms the system – a process that can be measured in hours rather than days and weeks. And they do not have to spend hours jogging the robot into various positions.
Asked whether he would recommend collaborative robotic laser welding to others, Hundley has no doubt: “I would highly advise it. If you don’t stay on the cutting edge of technology, you’re going to be behind the eight ball.”
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