On August 11, China’s first batch of flexible manufacturing intelligent welding robot system in offshore engineering, led by COOEC in research and development, was successfully integrated in Tianjin and has entered the testing and acceptance stage. This marks a major breakthrough in China’s flexible manufacturing technology for critical nodes in offshore oil and gas equipment.

As one of the key technology projects for intelligent manufacturing in the “14th Five-Year Plan” major scientific and technological projects in the offshore oil and gas engineering sector, the three sets of intelligent robots integrated this time are have capabilities of intelligent assembly and welding of tubular joint prefabrication, intelligent welding of block joints, and intelligent welding of reinforcement rings and collapse arrestor rings for deepwater jackets. Each unit in the system can handle workpieces weighing up to 30 tons, has a designed service life of 20 years, and features 100% domestically developed core software and process libraries, with a hardware localization rate exceeding 80%. This achievement fills a domestic technical gap in the intelligent welding equipment field for offshore engineering.

COOEC has innovated an engineering concept of “transforming customized products to standard products and extending standard products to standard components” for large offshore platform structures, and developed an intelligent welding robot equipment system, which achieves more than 10 domestic technological innovations, such as AI-based weld seam visual recognition, three-dimensional laser vision intelligent assembly, and multi-layer multi-pass intelligent welding path planning. The robots can be activated with a single click to complete intelligent welding of product components, and are equipped with functions such as intelligent weld path correction, intelligent root pass welding, and dual-sided four-wire intelligent filling.

Next, the project team will proceed with commissioning and acceptance of the intelligent robotic equipment system for flexible manufacturing in offshore engineering. Efforts will be accelerated to implement the “R&D–Validation–Promotion” mechanism, and advance China’s flexible manufacturing intelligent welding equipment in offshore engineering from the stage of “able to weld” to “welding with precision and speed,” achieving yet another leap forward.