Robot Welds Autonomously Underwater

An AI-supported robot system can perform underwater welding largely independently—opening up new perspectives for industrial maintenance processes.

To relieve professional diving teams of the burden of repairing maritime infrastructure, a consortium led by the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) has developed an autonomous underwater welding robot. The system combines artificial intelligence, sensor technology, and a robotic manipulator to perform welding work underwater largely independently.

The central element of the system is the modular underwater manipulator: According to the DFKI, the robot arm is designed for use at depths of up to 6,000 m, has a reach of around 2 m, and can be adapted to different scenarios. A combination of decentralized joint control and higher-level motion planning is intended to enable precise and reproducible welding movements.

AI Automatically Determines Weld Path

Another key feature of the system is AI-supported weld seam recognition. A stereo camera system developed by Fraunhofer IGD captures the weld site directly at the burner. Based on this, AI models identify weld seams and their start and end points and calculate the optimal path for the robot.

A flux-cored wire welding process is used to automate the process. A continuous wire is intended to eliminate the need for electrode changes, which have been common practice up to now. According to DFKI, this creates stable process conditions and is a prerequisite for automated underwater manufacturing.

Further Development Planned

In a final demonstration, all the sub-technologies were brought together in an underwater test tank. Project manager Christian Koch says that they were able to show that automated submerged flux-cored wire welding is fundamentally feasible. In further projects, the system will be further developed for real-world conditions such as currents, salt water, and greater depths.

This is a partly automated translation of this german article.