In the field of welding automation, traditional teaching robots have brought about great changes, but the complexity and time cost of their programming are still bottlenecks. The rise of teaching-free robot welding workstations is opening a new chapter in intelligent welding with its revolutionary "install and weld" capability.
Traditional teaching robots rely on engineers to hold a teaching pendant to record the position and path of the welding gun point by point, which takes hours or even days. The program is fixed, and the consistency of the workpiece is demanding. Fine-tuning requires re-teaching.
The core of the teaching-free robot lies in "visual guidance" and "intelligent algorithm". The 3D vision system (laser scanning/structured light) instantly captures the three-dimensional contour of the workpiece, and the AI algorithm automatically identifies the position and type of the weld (corner weld, lap weld, etc.), and generates the optimal welding path and process parameters in real time.
The traditional method requires long teaching to replace a new workpiece. The teaching-free robot welding workstation only needs to replace the fixture, and visual scanning + path planning can be completed in a few minutes, which is especially suitable for flexible production of multiple varieties and small batches. In addition, human-machine collaboration is simplified. Operators only need to clamp the workpiece and select the welding program (or the system automatically matches). Professional robot programming skills are not required, which greatly reduces the dependence on senior technicians.
Traditional teaching welding robots strictly follow the preset trajectory. When encountering workpiece size deviation, thermal deformation or clamping error, it is easy to cause welding deviation and leakage. The teaching-free welding robot has the ability of real-time weld seam tracking (Tack Sensing / Through-the-Arc Seam Tracking), and continuously fine-tunes the position of the welding gun during welding to ensure accurate seam alignment at all times.
The teaching-free robot welding workstation can not only greatly save programming time, improve equipment utilization, reduce the demand for high-priced programming engineers, and reduce rework and scrap losses caused by programming errors or workpiece deviations. It can also easily cope with the trend of diversified weldments and fragmented orders, becoming an ideal choice for small-batch customized production and accelerating the transformation of enterprises to "smart manufacturing".