Earth moving equipment includes bulldozers, excavators, off-highway trucks, and other types of heavy equipment.

Manufacturers of this equipment are amongst the largest arc welders in the world. It is no surprise that today they continue their technological advances in arc welding automation by using laser vision systems.  The quality of the weld must be quite high to meet fatigue requirements.

Arc welding equipment

In some cases, joint geometry variation can run the full length of the joint. Therefore, sensing the joint becomes a must in order to use robotic welding.  If not, these joints would have to be welded manually, which is an extremely tedious task when welding very thick plate of up to 60mm.

GMA welding with laser vision systems are the solutions for performing joint finding, joint tracking, and adaptive multi-pass welding. More, twin or tandem wire is being used in these automatic welding processes in order to increase speed and deposition rate.

Quality control

Quality control of bead shape and dimensions is another task where Servo-Robot is involved in this industry. In fact, Servo-Robot's system is used for specific welds which are critical for the strength of the weldment and may be susceptible to fatigue.

Over welding is controlled using our system which in turn saves on consumable and welding-cycle time. With our system, inspection is more reliable and can be performed at a faster speed as compared to using special gauges where the measurement result is less objective.

Laser welding

The earth moving manufacturers were, and still are, in the forefront in welding technology development. Laser welding processing on thick plate is their newest challenge. The objective is to be able to produce lighter equipment with equivalent strength. This is difficult because part fit-up is a critical requirement for this process and not easy to achieve on large components.

Servo-Robot technology is again used to ensure that the laser beam is well-positioned over the joint being welded, helping them to achieve their objective.