MyWelder: A collaborative system for intuitive robot-assisted welding

Welding is an industrial application where automation is always increasing. The reasons behind this are twofold: on one hand the shortage of experienced welding professionals, on the other hand the gain in process quality and productivity. However, fully automated solutions, like the use of industrial robots dedicated to welding, are difficult to be exploited, especially in small and medium-sized enterprises, due to the complexity of robot programming. In this paper, we propose MyWelder, a robot-assisted welding solution for automated MIG/MAG welding. The system is intuitive and easily programmable and ensures high productivity even with small production batches. An extended experimental validation with professional welders has been carried out to evaluate the performance of the system and its usability.