by Fenella Saunders
Assembling a tanker ship is appallingly inhumane work: Huge steel blocks must be joined together in an intricate layout that forces welders to spend long hours in cramped, fume-laden spaces. So roboticist Pablo González de Santos and his colleagues at the Industrial Automation Institute of the Spanish Council for Scientific Research are delegating the job to ROWER, a 4-foot-long mobile platform that incorporates a commercial robotic welding arm.
ROWER operates inside the ribbed, double-walled hull that forms the bottom of a tanker. The robot's four pistonlike feet extend and press against the ribs on the floor and the ceiling, keeping it in place while it welds a watertight seam between adjoining blocks. To move forward, the device retracts one foot at a time, takes a step onto the next set of ribs, and extends its pistons to regain secure footing. When it finishes welding one ship block, ...
