Manual Welding with Robotic Assistance Compared to Conventional Manual Welding

This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of impedance compensation type robotic assistance, presented in a previous work, by comparing manual welding with robotic assistance to conventional manual welding without a robot. The novelty of the current paper is comparison of two sets of data that were published in separate studies, but were not yet compared to each other. One of these previous studies had demonstrated the effectiveness of the robotic assistance in comparison to welding with the robot interactively while the assistance-scheme was off, but not to the case of conventional manual welding as applied every-day in workshops without a robot. The other previous work had collecting welding data with a motion capture system while conventional manual welding in order to demonstrate the differences between novice and professional welders. The comparison presented in the current paper demonstrates that the robotic assistance significantly improves the performance of novice welders in comparison to conventional welding without a robot, whereas the performance of the professional welders remains almost constant across conventional welding and with robotic assistance. The results of this paper show the effectiveness of physically interactive robotic assistance technology to improve the performance of novice welders in the every-day industrial task of manual welding.