A fab shop runs short batches of frames, brackets and assemblies. A skilled welder spends half the shift on identical beads that a robot could hold more steadily, and the other half on the judgement work that still needs a person: fit-up, sequence, and what to do when the part is not where the drawing said.
The cell has to stay open. Fencing every bay for a week of welding on a two-day order kills the economics. That is why shops buy cobots here rather than industrial arms: the safety case is for a shared bay, not a fortress.
Requirements are stated with the reason they exist. A requirement without a reason is a preference, and preferences are how a shortlist quietly becomes a recommendation.
The torch package is heavier than the cobot brochure suggests; reach must cover the fixture without wrestling the cable.
Bead placement errors compound across a long seam; datasheet repeatability without the torch is marketing.
Collaborative mode does not cancel UV, fume or hot metal — the assessment has to cover the process, not only contact force.
Hand-teaching every pass is fine for one SKU; production needs weave, multipass and a path to vision or through-arc tracking.
Job shops live on variety. A cell that needs a systems engineer for every new part never leaves the pilot bay.
These are not weaknesses to trade off against a high score. Any one of them ends the conversation, which is why they sit outside the scoring entirely.
Shipping robots in our catalogue whose class matches this job, listed under the industrial weighting so you can scan them — not a recommendation. Weld quality and uptime decide renewals; an open SDK does not join metal.
Order follows the industrial profile score. Requirements and disqualifiers above are editorial; they do not remove robots from this list. How the score works
Compare candidatesThese are kept off the candidate list rather than mixed into it. A candidate list is something you can act on, and hardware nobody can order does not belong on one.
Rainbow Robotics
One of the few cobot jobs with a clear payback story when the parts are repetitive and the welders are scarce. It fails when shops buy the arm first and discover fixturing, fume extraction and WPS paperwork were the real project. Where it sticks, a welding distributor owns the process package — the cobot is the commodity.
