Originally published in The Robot Report
Written by: The Robot Report Staff

Shortages of skilled workers and increasing demand are leading to a deficit in welding. At FABTECH, collaborative robot arms from Universal Robots will be part of three welding automation systems to address this challenge.

According to the American Welding Society, the average welder today in the U.S. is 55 years old, and less than 20% of welders are under the age of 35. These demographics lead to a projected shortfall of 400,000 welders by 2024.

“Addressing the severe labor shortage in weld shops with cobots is now a solution that we see rapidly emerging, as industry leaders and innovators start offering automated welding tools utilizing the Universal Robots’ platform,” said Stu Shepherd, regional sales director of Universal Robots’ Americas division.

The new BotX Welder, developed by Hirebotics, Red-D-Arc, and Airgas, uses a UR10e cobot to address two major hurdles of robotic arc welding: ease of programming and the ease in which a customer can obtain the system without assuming the cost of ownership.

There are no installation costs with BotX. With cloud monitoring, manufacturers pay only for the hours the system actually welds, thereby enabling the manufacturer to hire and fire BotX as business needs dictate.

“We chose Universal Robots to power BotX for several reasons,” said Rob Goldiez, co-founder and CEO of Hirebotics. “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.”

Customers can teach BotX the required welds with an app on any smartphone or tablet. The complete BotX product offering comes with the UR10e cobot arm, cloud connector, welder, wire feeder, MIG welding gun, weld table, and configurable user-input touch buttons.