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Exhaust fabricator transitions tube welding from manual to robotic

Welders at Massachusetts shop learn to use robot without programming, extensive training

 tubular exhaust parts

Davico Mfg. fabricates more than 3,000 tubular exhaust parts for customers all over North America. The company installed a robotic arc welding system with a teach interface to help resolve complex robot programming challenges.

Davico Mfg., New Bedford, Mass., was launched in 1987 in the bay of a muffler shop fabricating replacement Subaru catalytic converters. Today the company is a leading manufacturer of aftermarket exhaust systems and direct-fit catalytic converters. The company fabricates and ships more than 3,000 unique exhaust products to customers throughout North America.

Training Welders in Robotic Programming

Finding and retaining a skilled workforce was constricting the company’s growth. President Ray Surprenant wanted to expand the company and increase production, but finding skilled welders and retaining them was a huge challenge.

Surprenant and Director of Operations Steve Vieira decided to try robotic automation and approached it in the traditional way. The manufacturer bought a ready-to weld-cell, and then sent three welders to two-week-long training sessions out of state to learn to program it. The company paid for their classes, travel, meals and hotel, and wages. The lost production as a result of their absences came at a cost as well.

When the welders returned to the plant, now trained to program the robots, they needed a few weeks of practice time with the robot to refine what they learned on their own equipment and develop their first-part programs.

Finally, after a few months, finished parts started coming out of the cell.

Training Dollars Leave With Welders

Unfortunately, just as part production and the automated welding started going smoothly and efficiently, the welders trained in programming started to leave for various reasons. All three left within a six-week period. Surprenant now had a robotic welding cell on his floor that no one knew how to use, having invested tens of thousands of dollars in training that walked out the door.

Surprenant and Vieira sought a way for the company’s current welding staff to operate a robotic welding cell, applying their welding skills without having to spend a lot of time learning to program it. They explored multiple robotic welding systems on the market, heard about Scalable Robotics, and investigated its technology.

Enter New Robotic Welding Interface

Scalable TEACH platform process

The Scalable TEACH platform process begins with the robot scanning the part to create a 3D model and the robot creating the program. The welder then provides input to the robot regarding the weld path by point-and-click. Finally, the process is validated in simulation before being sent to the robot for auto-tuning and the welder’s personal input, and then the production welding begins.

Scalable Robotics’ welding interface is engineered to eliminate the need for complicated programming to operate the robotic welding machine. It is designed to allow any welder to teach a robot the weld paths without any knowledge of robot programming. It is offered on ABB robots, and is most commonly installed with an ABB FlexArc system. Together they form a ready-to-weld system with a simplified programming interface.

How It Works. The 3D vision sensor coupled with robot motion generates a 3D model that lets the robot understand the geometry of the part. Then the welder shows the robot where and how to weld it.

To create a new part program, the welder follows the same straightforward, five-step process: auto-scan, teach by point-and-click, validate, auto-tune, and weld. All these steps are guided by a graphical interface so that they are intuitively obvious to the welder.

Scalable Robotics’ Tom Fuhlbrigge explained: “All you need to know to use this robotic arc welding system is how to weld. The first thing you do is place the part in any position on the welding table and the robot scans the part. No CAD is needed. A 3D camera on the ABB robot automatically takes many images of the part as the robot moves above it. Once the robot finishes the scan and processes the images, the 3D model pops up on the screen. It’s very important that you and the robot see the part at the same time to avoid disparities between the welder and the robot during welding paths creation.”

Teaching the Robot. “The best way to teach a robot is the same way you would teach a person, by pointing at where you want the welds to be,” Fuhlbrigge continued. You use a hand-held teaching pointer and click where you want the welds to go. You then validate the path in simulation in the interface. At that point the robot has all the weld paths and parameters it needs to automatically fine-tune the welds.”

The robot then goes in with its TouchSense and adjusts every position it was taught. At each position, the welder now has the option to apply their welding knowledge to further adjust the weld path, angles, or other particulars they know would make a good weld. They can do a quick test and run the weld for real. “The whole process takes five to 20 minutes for most parts, and the welder never sees a line of code from start to finish,” Fuhlbrigge said.

A Welder Becomes a Welder/Programmer

Scalable Robotics installed the programming system on an ABB robot at Davico in January 2021. The first person at Davico to learn to operate the new system was a welder named Josh Hutton. Beforehand, he had never touched a robot nor programmed anything, but he had more than five years of welding experience on the parts, and that was all he needed.

Welding Tube Requires Welder Knowledge

Welding exhaust components is not a simple task. All the welds require circular motions, and the metal thickness varies greatly between the heavy flanges and the thin-walled pipe. This means that the welding parameters, torch path, and angles are very critical. Plus, gaps in the fit-up between components and variations in the seam locations can add to the difficulties.

Scalable Robotics’ welding interface for ABB robots

Scalable Robotics’ welding interface is engineered to eliminate the need for complicated programming to operate the robotic welding machine.

All this means that a standard set of values will not always work, and it is extremely important to capture the welder’s knowledge and experience in welding each part model. With the system, the welder can easily fine-tune everything to match his own experience hand welding those same parts.

With the easy-to-use interface and his welder’s eye, Hutton was able to make his first production-quality part program on that first day, which included 24 individual weld paths. Since then, he has made more than 20 additional part programs for that cell and keeps production with the ABB robot fully loaded.

Expedited Results

After implementing the robot-assisted arc welding system at its plant, Davico started getting its high-volume products to market faster than the competition. “The system helped us move parts into production much sooner,” Surprenant said.

In assessing the return on investment, Surprenant determined that the automated robotic welding system paid for itself quickly because he was able to eliminate his robot programming training costs. “For us, it started with savings in the training—just in the turnover. Every time we had to start with a new welder or had to send them away for a week or two for training, that was a significant cost. And then the development time … programming a robot, and the trial and error to get within tolerances of the robot were always difficult. This is really intuitive for our welders to use. So now we’re able to get deliverable parts much faster.

“The ease of use of the interface makes it easier for our welders to use the system without being intimidated by the robotics,” he added.

Davico Mfg., 95 Brook St., New Bedford, Mass., 800-422-6046, www.davicomfg.com.

ABB, global.abb/group/en

Scalable Robotics, scalablerobotics.ai