Shipyard automation

Advanced robot technology for shipbuilding

In the past decades, shipbuilding transformed from a labor intensive into a technology driven industry. Modern shipyards are high-tech production facilities, where impressive productivity levels are reached. Flexibility is crucial, to deal with the large complexity of the structures and ever changing designs. KRANENDONK’s ability to automate non-repetitive production proved to be useful in these demanding environments.

Since 1987, KRANENDONK and its partners have implemented many robot systems for shipbuilding. Automatic production of superstructures requires extreme quality of all units, with respect to hardware and software as well as the suppliers ability to integrate the system into customer production environment. With our portfolio we supply many of the world’s largest shipyards such as Newport News Shipbuilding, STX Group, Aker Group and Fincantieri Group.

Especially our ‘in-house’ developed software highly contributes to our success in this area. Depending on application, automation level and number of welding robots various programming methods can be used. The two basic methods – developed and supplied by KRANENDONK – are ARAC and RINAS.

ARAC is a parameterized macro based programming system, where the operator or work preparation engineer directly may create the work order, thus the system can work without any production stops.

The award-winning RinasWeld software enables fully automated welding of complex structures. With the RinasWeld software, it is possible to derive all production data from the 3D CAD model. This drastically reduces the time required for work preparation. RinasWeld balances the workload, adds preferred weld data and offers collision avoidance.

KRANENDONK’s portfolio features high-tech robotic solutions for various stages of the shipbuilding process. Robotic systems vary from multi-robot welding gantries to a standardized cutting cell, the CCS 600

Go to shipbuilding product overview.