USING ROBOTS FOR EASY, ACCURATE, VERTICAL WELDS

Gert Jørgensen from Inrotech tells Tank Storage Magazine about the benefits of using small, mobile crawler robots for large, vertical welds on storage tanks   WHAT WERE THE ORIGINS OF INROTECH? We were born out of the shipbuilding industry. Here in Odense in Denmark there was a shipyard owned by Maersk, that was recognised as the most automated shipyard in the world. The founder of Inrotech, Flemming Jørgensen, my brother, was working at the shipyard as a robot consultant. While he was doing that, he got an idea about how to do things differently. Typically, you have a robot sitting in a fixed position and you take the object and move it to the robot. The robot does some work on the object, welding for example, and then you move the object away. In shipyards, they need very large production lines with huge robots and huge gantry systems. Our founder had the idea of doing it the other way round. Instead of having a huge robot and huge constructions and moving the object to the robot, why not make the robots mobile and move the robot to the object? The management of the Lindø shipyard bought the idea and ordered 10 of them. Representatives from shipyards around the world...