Welding Cobot Safety: How to Prepare Your Workspace to Safely Include Cobots

Keeping your skilled welders safe is always a priority, but there’s no denying that it can also be challenging. Welding is one of the most hazardous industrial tasks people can do and represents close to 25% of all accidents.

The introduction of cobots, or collaborative robots, can help reduce the number and severity of incidents that affect your welding team, while also increasing productivity. It might seem like working side-by-side with something designed to complete a specific task without interruption might result in more injuries, but the safety of the humans they work with is a major consideration in the design of cobots.
 

The Importance of Welder Safety

Skilled welders are an important part of your manufacturing process and, along with needing to ensure that they’re as safe as possible at all times to ensure productivity, doing everything you can to keep your team safe protects you from financial penalties and compliance issues.

Fostering an environment of safety ensures that your team can confidently complete their tasks as safely as possible. This means that you can continue to meet your manufacturing goals. More than that, however, workplace injuries come with a whole host of issues.

There are financial repercussions that include lost productivity and insurance claims to the employee. Beyond that, you open yourself up to fines and penalties from OSHA2. 

These penalties are updated each year. As of January 2024, they are:

• $16,131 per violation for serious or other-than-serious violations
• $16,131 per day beyond the abatement date for failure to abate
• $161,323 per violation for willful or repeated violations

On top of the expense, you risk gaining a reputation as a less-than-safe employer, which can make it harder to find welders at a time when welders are already scarce3 .

What are the risks involved with welding?

Welding is inherently dangerous. Qualified welders are working a physically demanding job that involves fire, electricity, gasses, and heavy materials. The risk of injury for human workers is high by default on most welding projects. This is one of the reasons why, as mentioned above, welding is one of the more hazardous industrial occupations.

At a high level, the risks include:

• Burns
• Eye damage
• Repetitive strain injuries
• Lifting injuries
• Lung damage from fumes
• Heat exhaustion

These risks are mitigated through personal protection equipment, safety protocols, and procedures designed to protect employees.

How Welding Cobots Help Increase Safety

Cobots remove human welders from the process, meaning your team isn’t directly involved in dealing with the hot welding unit. This reduces the risks of burns and other heat-related injuries, as well as a lot of the risk from issues like fume inhalation.

Along with that, Cobot welders have a lot of built-in features that are designed to make it safer for the skilled workers using the cobot. These features aren’t always obvious, but cobots contain protocols that prevent them from moving or doing their tasks if they encounter resistance, for example. They also help reduce worker fatigue because the cobot welders are sharing the work with experienced welders, which decreases the risk of human error due to tiredness.

Getting Started with Cobot Safety

Like a lot of things, training is an important consideration when getting started with cobot welding. Your team needs to fully understand how to work alongside in a collaborative robotics setting, what their role is in the cobot welding process, and what kinds of things they need to watch out for. It also helps if your welders understand basic cobot maintenance.

Along with that, you need to have a workspace that has everything needed to safely operate a welding cobot.

Conducting a Risk Assessment

The first step when getting started with cobots is to conduct a risk assessment. You need to be sure that you capture, document, and understand all the possible risks to your employees and possible workspace hazards that you need to mitigate to safely use welding cobots. OSHA requires you to follow safety standards ISO-102184 and TS-150665,  which outline the safety requirements for working with industrial robots (like those used in traditional automation) and industrial cobots, respectively.

Example of risk assessment

Conducting a risk assessment allows you to catalog all possible risks, assign a risk level, and outline the safety solution for your organization. Beyond being a legal requirement, the risk assessment helps you better understand the steps you need to take to ensure worker safety when using cobots. You may find that your collaborative welding operation requires certain safety features to be used during operation that aren’t necessarily standard for welding cobots, like safety cages, scanners, or door locks.

Important Safety Considerations When Welding with Cobots

Along with the standard welding safety requirements, there are some factors that you need to consider while setting up cobots for welding. These will ensure that your welders are safe and that your cobots have everything they require to operate as safely as possible.

1. Clear Working Environment: The first thing you need to do is make sure that your cobot has the space it needs to operate safely. This means ensuring there’s nothing the robot arm (or the welder) can bump into, for example, or ensuring that any cables the cobot needs (including the welding torch) aren’t tripping hazards. Similarly, make sure that spatter guards are in place if they’re needed.
    
2. Cobot Stability: Is the cobot secure or is it at risk of tipping over while completing its welding task? You’ll need to make sure that you’ve properly secured the cobot to the base or cart as directed by the manufacturer.
    
3. Welding Cobot Safety Fixturing: Just like with human welders, a proper welding table and fixtures are an important part of keeping your welders and operators safe.
    
4. Guarding Requirements: Cobots don’t usually require fencing around them while they operate, but if it comes up during your risk assessment, additional safety features like fencing or light curtains (a beam of light that shuts down the cobot when broken) can be used to further enhance the safety of your workspace.
    
5. Fume Mitigation: This is always an important consideration, regardless of whether a human is welding or a cobot. Fumes are always present when you’re welding. You need to make sure you have proper ventilation, fume hoods, or fume extraction tools in place.
    
6. Flash Protection: Welding curtains protect welders and anyone else in the shop from retinal damage caused by flash from the welder. When welding with a cobot, welders should wear helmets, but curtains help protect anyone around who is not wearing PPE–just like your typical manual welding booth.

What role do humans play in safety?

Human counterparts must be trained and accredited welders. The more someone understands the task and the risks involved, the more likely they are to keep safety front and center in all that they do.

You can’t just assume that the cobot welder has everything under control or that safety is taken care of because that’s what was programmed into the machine. Welders still need to wear PPE and take the same basic precautions they would take if they were doing the work without a cobot. This includes wearing masks and eye protection, heavy gloves, and steel-toed boots, along with any other gear required by the employer.

On top of that, anyone working with a cobot welder should be properly trained to work with cobots. You want to make sure that everyone understands the potential issues that might arise, as well as risks that might not exist when doing the work without a cobot. Cobot welders are designed for safe human interaction, but precautions still need to be taken to protect human workers, just in case.

Conclusion

When paired with traditional welding safety protocol, cobots help increase the safety of your team, while allowing you to continue to meet your production goals, something that’s especially important considering the ongoing labor shortage in the welding industry.

Want to learn more about how welding cobots can safely increase productivity in your shop?

Contact us today for a virtual demo.