A survey of platform designs for portable robotic welding in large scale structures

Automated welding has been very effective in enhancing the quality and quantity of weld jobs along with improving the safety of the workers. Nevertheless, most existing welding robots are massive and immobile. Typically, the work-pieces are transferred to the robots for welding. This makes it difficult for many welding applications that have large scale structures e.g. shipbuilding, construction, on-site repair work, etc. In these cases, the welding robot should be able to be transported to the work-pieces. The purpose of this paper is to explore and study various recent developments in portable welding robot designs. Based on this, several strategies of designing portable welding robot are classified and discussed.