The use of collaborative robots (cobots) for welding applications has been one of the most rapidly expanding cobot applications over the past few years, with several companies offering a variety of systems. At Automate 2023, Pro Spot International, a manufacturer of resistance spot welding equipment, introduced what it says is the world’s first cobot spot welder. The system is designed for manufacturers who join sheet metal using spot welding.
For this new device, Pro Spot combined its new i5s spot welder with Universal Robots’ cobots. According to Pro Spot, this combined platform delivers two to three times more manufacturing capacity compared to using the system with a human operator.
Pro Spot said the i5s welding system features “next-generation auto welding technology that senses material thickness and resistance to adjust weld profiles automatically. It also captures an immense amount of data about each weld, allowing for quality control, traceability and job repeatability.”
The company noted that the i5s is only spot welder on the market with Wi-Fi connectivity, which enables instant updates, data exports and email capability of the weld logs for performance reporting.
Additional features of the combined system include:
- Built in library for materials, weld caps and thickness stackups for semi-auto mode.
- Touchscreen interface with on-board training and user manuals in video and PDF formats.
- Complete data capture of welding and machine data.
Learn more about robotic welding technologies from Universal Robots
and ABB.
