Brandon firm unveils robotic 3D welder

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This article was published 30/04/2015 (4050 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

BRANDON — Behlen Industries’ newest welder likes to play the harp and table tennis and tirelessly churns out custom welding three times as fast as co-workers.

With fanfare worthy of a Hollywood action movie, Behlen unveiled its latest hire Wednesday, but what burst through a paper poster wasn’t human.

It was a robot.

“Close to three years ago, we committed to getting into the robotic age to automated manufacturing,” Sean Lepper, Behlen’s vice-president and general manager, said as he unveiled the $1-million robotic welder. The Brandon firm didn’t spare the pomp, with dramatic music and slickly produced videos of the robot playing a glass harp and playing table tennis.

“It’s taken that long to have a software and a robotic system that can weld custom pieces every time.”

This isn’t the first automated robot Behlen uses in its processes, but it is the first to be programmable to create custom steel pieces using 3D software.

“Robotic welding is typically a high-volume, low-variable type of process, but at Behlen, we needed the opposite,” said Pat Versavel, vice-president, engineering and innovation. “Since almost all of our production is custom-designed, we needed to find a way to make our robotic welding cell used for high-variable, low-volume work.”

Lepper insisted the new non-sentient addition to the company won’t affect the number of people it employs.

“It won’t result in any loss of jobs; it allows us to produce more,” he said. “We’re looking at hiring 15 welders right now,” bringing the total to about 80.

Each year, starting around this time, the company feels a bottleneck in production due to heavy demand, which Lepper said he hopes will be relieved by the new robot.

“It can out-produce a human, but it still needs touch-up, still needs a welder to run it and gives the capacity to take off the peaks in the season,” Lepper said.

After a lackluster year due to the plug in the oil industry — for which it does substantial work — the company is a little cautious.

‘It won’t result in any loss of jobs; it allows us to produce more. We’re looking at hiring 15 welders right now’

— Sean Lepper, vice-president and general manager of Behlen Industries

But Lepper said diversification in Ontario and overseas markets has given Behlen a safety net to weather the temperaments of the oil and gas industry.

The new robot’s three-step process starts with a detailing program rarely used in the pre-engineered steel building sector, the company says. Engineers are able to create a detailed and organized 3D model, including specs of each individual part of a project. That model is then fed into a second piece of software.

In the second phase, a robotic simulation program uses touch-sensing with the robotic arm to detect any potential errors or clashes and then produces a real-time, visual simulation of the weld. This is the first time this software has been applied to welding, a process that was more than a year in the making.

Phase three is when the robot welding arm goes to work. Using a metal-cored arc welding technique, the robot is able to make any kind of weld.

“It’s the first of its kind in the world and it’s going to make Behlen a stronger competitor in the marketplace and puts Brandon on the map as an innovative place,” Lepper said.

gbruce@brandonsun.com