Originally published in Engineering.com
Written by: Engineering.com Staff

If you’ve ever experienced welder’s flu after welding galvanized metal, had your face swell up from UV damage, or flashed your eyes because you just needed to tack something quick, you know that welding is a tough trade. Fumes, heat, and arc flash are hard on the body. In manufacturing, this can make a good welder hard to find.

The industry’s hiring challenge, combined with the struggle metal fabrication companies experience in producing quality parts quickly and in small runs, prompted Hirebotics to develop the BotX Welder.

“Many people didn’t believe that collaborative robots could perform such heavy-duty tasks as welding,” says Rob Goldiez, co-founder of Hirebotics. “We realized the need of a solution for small and medium sized metal fabricators trying to find welders.”

Hirebotics’ hire-a-robot business model built on the Universal Robot, set the foundation for the BotX. It is a welding solution powered by the UR10e cobot that is easy to teach, producing automation quality with small batch part runs.

In developing BotX, Hirebotics addressed two major hurdles of robotic welding: the ease of programming and the ease in which a customer can obtain the system without assuming the risk of ownership. There are no installation costs with BotX and with cloud monitoring, manufacturers pay only for the hours the system actually welds.

“You can hire and fire BotX as your business needs dictate,” explains Goldiez.

The complete product offering comes with the UR10e cobot arm, cloud connector, welder, wire feeder, MIG welding gun, weld table, and configurable user-input touch buttons. The customer simply provides wire, gas, and parts. Customers can teach BotX the required welds simply via a smartphone app utilizing welding libraries.

“We chose Universal Robots’ e-Series line for several reasons,” says Goldiez. “With Universal Robots’ open architecture we were able to control not only wire feed speed and voltage, but torch angle as well, which ensures a quality weld every time.”

“The collaborative nature of the solution enables an operator to move between multiple cells without interrupting production, greatly increasing the productivity of an employee.”

PMI LLC in Wisconsin was one of the first customers of the BotX. “A large order would mean we need to hire 10-15 welders to fulfill it — and they’re just not out there,” says VP of Operations at PMI, Erik Larson. “We would No Bid contracts on a regular basis. With the BotX solution we now quote that work and have been awarded contracts, so it has really helped grow our business.”

“Being able to simply hire the BotX Welder, and quickly switch between welds by using our smart phone—and only pay for the hours it works—is huge for us. It took our area lead, who had no prior robotics experience, half an hour to teach it how to weld the first part.”