Breaking the “Welder Shortage” and Long-Seam Challenge: JHY ROBOT Launches Mobile Cobot to Reshape Resistance Furnace Welding

China’s manufacturing sector is currently undergoing a profound demographic shift. In the welding industry, this challenge is particularly acute: veteran skilled welders are approaching retirement, while younger generations are reluctant to enter a profession characterized by high intensity, heavy smoke, and radiation exposure. The resulting “recruitment and retention crisis” has become a major bottleneck constraining production capacity. Meanwhile, although traditional industrial robots offer high efficiency, their complex installation, commissioning, programming, and maintenance create a heavy reliance on specialized engineers. Furthermore, handling large workpieces often requires expensive ground tracks or gantries, resulting in high capital expenditure and poor adaptability for high-mix, low-volume production.

Against this backdrop, collaborative robots (cobots)—which combine safety, flexibility, and extreme ease of use—have emerged as an inevitable solution aligned with the times. JHY ROBOT, a professional manufacturer specializing in welding automation, has keenly addressed these industry pain points with the official launch of its Integrated Mobile Collaborative Welding Robot. By eliminating complex coding and utilizing a dual-mode approach of “Hand-Guiding Teaching” and “Online Teaching” combined with a highly flexible mobile chassis, JHY ROBOT provides a cost-effective and efficient automation pathway for large-scale workpiece welding.

1. From “Code Commands” to “Hand-Guiding”: Translating Welder Expertise into Productivity

Traditional robot deployment typically necessitates dedicated robotics engineers. Complex commissioning processes, obscure pendant commands, and tedious maintenance routines often exclude frontline welders. JHY ROBOT’s new cobot completely dismantles this technical barrier. The system requires no complex software programming on a PC or logical configurations via graphical interfaces. Instead, it returns control to the frontline welder:

2. Mobility Equals Deployment: Integrated Design Solves the “Large Workpiece” Dilemma

Resistance furnace shells are typically “large and long” with seams extending several meters or even tens of meters—a scenario where traditional fixed robots often fall short. Solutions usually involve building massive gantry structures or moving heavy workpieces, which consume floor space and lack flexibility.

3. Case Validation: High-Efficiency Application on Long-Seam Resistance Furnace Welding

Technology proves its value through application. JHY ROBOT’s Mobile Collaborative Welding Robot has been successfully deployed on resistance furnace production lines. Resistance furnace bodies are typically large, featuring long seams that are mostly straight lines or regular arcs—a classic scenario for large-format thin-sheet welding.

In this case, the cobot demonstrated exceptional adaptability. Facing multi-meter-long shell splicing seams, operators utilized the Hand-Guiding Teaching function, completing path planning in a fraction of the time required by traditional robots, which often takes hours. Subsequently, the robot executed stable, continuous welding along the track, producing uniform and aesthetically pleasing seams without the need for segmented welding or cumbersome inter-layer cleaning. This application not only validates the cobot’s stability in long-seam welding but also provides resistance furnace manufacturers with a “light-asset, high-flexibility” blueprint for automation upgrades.