Kemppi’s official cobot welding demo, shown here on an ABB GoFa collaborative robot. MexxBot uses ABB collaborative robots with a Kemppi welder — the same human-and-cobot workflow.
A welding cobot doesn’t replace your boilermaker. It hands them an offsider.
Whenever we show a welding cobot, someone asks the obvious question: “So this puts welders out of work?” It’s a fair question and the honest answer is no. In practice it’s the opposite.
Think of the cobot as a trades assistant. It takes the hot, dirty, repetitive, fume-heavy passes, the work nobody enjoys doing all day. The boilermaker still does the skilled part: reading the drawing, setting up the job, and tacking the parts together accurately. Then they hand it to the cobot to run the long welds, and step away to set up the next job, out of the heat and the fumes.
What the boilermaker keeps doing (because the cobot can’t):
- Interpreting the job and planning the welds
- Fixturing and setting up the part
- Tacking components together accurately
- Quality-checking the finished work
What the cobot takes off their plate:
- Long, repetitive, and multi runs that cause fatigue
- Time spent standing in heat, UV, and fume
- The boring passes that burn out skilled people
Fume is the part worth dwelling on. Welder exposure to fume is under more scrutiny than ever, and it’s a real health issue, not a box-ticking one. That’s why our system runs a Kemppi Flexlite GF fume-extraction torch, which pulls fume straight from the nozzle at the source, rather than relying only on the welder standing in it. And because the torch uses a quick-attach holder, your welder can lift it off the cobot and weld by hand whenever the job calls for it, then click it back on. The cobot fits the workflow, the workflow doesn’t bend around the cobot.
For a trade facing a genuine skills shortage, that’s the point: you don’t have enough welders, so you let the ones you have spend their time on skilled work instead of burning hours and lungs on the boring passes.
See how it works
MexxBot pairs an ABB collaborative robot with a Kemppi welder, built to work alongside your team, not instead of it.