White Paper : Flexible Fixturing for Robotic Welding Applications

Manufactures always want to improve their productivity, either by reducing production costs or cycle time. The robotic welding process is one manufacturing process that is worth automating. This is why welding robots are already used in some companies. Usually in the process, the pieces are placed in jigs and from there are welded by the robotic welder. Even if this looks simple, robotic welding brings many challenges that Robotiq intends to eliminate.

Here is some of these challenges:

• As stated before, the use of jigs is common, but not the right solution for high-mix productions. Designing a jig for every model can be very expensive.

• Each time the model in production changes, the jigs have to be changed too. This increases production time.

• Moreover, a human operator has to be there in order to feed the robotic welder with parts.

We, at Robotiq, had the idea to use flexible end effectors to: handle, position, and fix parts for a robotic welder. So instead of having a bunch of custom jigs for specific parts, manufacturers now need just one single robot gripper to handle all their parts for robotic welding assembly.

Having this in mind, we have proceeded to test our electric grippers in a real robotic welding environment to see how well it performs. You can get the white paper about this test here.

Watch the following video showing this robotic welding application with our 3-Finger Adaptive Robot Gripper.