Spurred on by the colossal shortage of welders in manufacturing and other sectors, robotic welding has gained enormous ground since it was introduced in 2017. Now, with AI growing in power, both the capabilities of robotic welding technology and its adoption rate are set to take further huge leaps forward.
But already, because it’s easy to use and safe, automated welding is a no-brainer for more and more companies. It boosts productivity because of its speed. And because any trained person can use it, it directly eases the welder shortage bottleneck. The American Welding Society recently estimated that 330,000 welders will be needed by 2028 (about 82,500 per year).
“Robotic welding systems help companies fill these labor gaps, while simultaneously increasing throughput and productivity, reducing waste and improving quality,” the AWS states. “Further, depending on the type of deployment, welding robots can be introduced in a way that enhances ergonomics for current welding staff.”
The quality of robotic welds is also outstanding, because these welders produce identical results, time after time. “The most expensive part of manufacturing a product can be the welding, because it’s a very precise skill,” explains Rob Goldiez, co-founder and CEO of Hirebotics in Nashville, Tenn. “And even for a very experienced welder, it’s difficult to get a consistent result every single time.
“It’s difficult to concentrate on the same task and to carry it out in exactly the same way for hours, weeks, months,” he continues. “Instead, a trained person can load the pieces into place and the robot does the same exact weld, over and over again.”
This type of system—with a person loading pieces and the robot doing the weld—is commonly called cobot welding, short for collaborative robot welding. (However, note that in March 2025, the “ISO Technical Committee 299 Working Group 3 for Industrial Robot Safety” revised ISO 10218-2:2025 with some wording changes that emphasize the entirety of what’s involved in carrying out an intended industrial robot task. The terms “collaborative robot” and “collaborative operation” have been removed from the document, and “collaborative application” is used instead. That said, the term “cobot” is likely here to stay in industry circles.)
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The demand for cobot welding applications is huge compared to traditional robot welding cells for simple reasons. Robot cells are designed for very specific high-volume, high-speed manufacture of hundreds of thousands of the same part. They are costly and generally take a lot of floor space. Cobot welders are small, much cheaper, moveable and versatile, perfect for smaller batches.
But no matter whether it’s a robot or cobot application, automated welding is a force multiplier. It gets welding done without welders and lets skilled welders concentrate on tasks where their skill experience is needed, but at the same time, it now can also achieve welds that are difficult or even impossible for humans to do, both in terms of precision and access.
That is, like robot surgeons, robot welders are very precise, can be angled in ways that are impossible to achieve for a human, and welding arms are narrow and can fit into spaces where a human welder cannot. Josh Williamson, global product manager at ABB, adds that arms have become longer over the last few years too, obviously allowing a larger work envelope.
Available Features of Robotic Welding Systems for Industrial Applications
Looking at a few of today’s products, the Hirebotics cobot welding system is app-based, which provides several key benefits, says Goldiez. “People are familiar with how to use apps (scroll, swipe, touchscreens, for example), and using our app therefore presents no barrier, where the dedicated device offered by other firms can look complicated and make people hesitant,” he explains. “Also, the same app on a tablet or smartphone can be used on multiple cobots. You can just switch between them.”
ABB Robotics, in addition to its robotic welding cells, has recently introduced several collaborative welding applications using its GoFa robot. One is an arc welding system with an interface device installed between the robot flange and the welding torch bracket. There are two buttons to record welding path positions, and a carousel menu is used to scroll through various programming instructions. The selected instruction is displayed on two screens.
The second ABB system, developed by Cooper in conjunction with Lincoln Electric, offers a teach pendant interface with a built-in welding library. The user inputs wire type, diameter, gas mixture and material thickness. The programmer only needs to record the weld start and end locations. All air moves are recorded with lead-through programming and path memorization.
Williamson also reports that ABB’s partner Scalable has launched a collaborative solution to solve a difficult industry application of cladding parts that have been worn due to many hours of use (e.g., an excavator bucket).
“With the Scalable system, you can take the collaborative cobot system to the workpiece and the safety peripherals needed are reduced because a human does not perform the welding, in combination with GoFa’s built in force and speed limitations,” he explains. “The solution is advanced in that you just have to mark the area to be hard-surfaced and the AI automatically generates the welding/cladding paths after scanning the part.”
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Indeed, Will Healy, global fabricated metals industry manager at Universal Robots (UR), notes that the lightweight nature of a cobot welder is making it increasingly common for them to be taken to equipment. “Utilizing pallets or magnetic bases, portable collaborative robot tools deploy directly at the weldment,” he says. Smooth Robotics, a UR partner, uses a magnetic mounting base to enable lightweight cobots to become portable welding tools for fabricators in many industries.
Another UR partner, Vectis Automation has a multi-axis positioning method for more complex multi-faceted parts and situations where the fabricator needs to place parts in position relative to gravity. Similarly, the multi-motion external axis solutions (including linear rails and rotary positioners) of UR partner THG Automation, also enables welding more complex parts as well as longer welds.
FANUC America’s automated arc welding robots can handle submerged arc welding, tandem torches and multiple welding processes on the same robot. They have slim wrists and hollow arms, allowing the welding torch to be routed internally so that torch cables are protected and their lifespan extended.
The through-arm design also allows offline programming without having to simulate cable placement, says Joe Hoffman, engineering product application segment manager. “Internal routed torch cables have a predicted path,” he explains, so that “simulations become much more accurate and programming times are greatly reduced.”
What’s Coming in Robotic Welding for Industrial Manufacturing
Already, AI is beginning to provide greater automation and capabilities to robotic welding applications. Hoffman explains that while tracking a weld joint, finding a weld seam or adjusting the weld process based on gap condition can all be done with software, “we see AI as a solution that can identify what is considered a weld failure or defect, make the necessary corrections without user intervention and produce throughput at rate with 100% confidence that the required quality is achieved.”
One example of this is the NovAI system from Novarc, which uses machine vision to achieve real-time weld monitoring and automatic adjustments to variances during the welding process. Goldiez adds that at Hirebotics, “we are using AI to do weld settings, particularly the speed of the arm. This helps new users understand what the travel speed should be, so they get going faster with using the system and can achieve higher speeds. Customers might not be aware that the settings can be changed so that you can have a faster weld of the same quality.”
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Whether or not it has AI involvement, automated welders are going to expand, says Healy, into TIG and laser welding, but also other processes such as plasma cutting and thermal spraying.
“I’m also seeing adoption of welding automation with collaborative robots in metal fabrication markets where, in the past, there has been limited exposure to automation,” he says. These markets include shipyards, architectural steel welding, industrial and construction machinery fabrication, infrastructure construction and manufacture of heavy trucks, HVAC equipment and more.
All of this is made possible, says Healy, due to the cobot’s lightweight deployability, touch-to-teach programming, but also external axis motion control, which has opened up more complex weldments and geometries, which in turn enables new markets to automate for the first time.
“Taking this a step further,” Healy says, “fabricators are combining the lightweight collaborative robot with overhead gantries to dramatically expand the reach and speed of welding automation on large parts. Few metal fabrication markets remain that cannot take advantage of some form of collaborative automation.”
