New Workmate" Comes into Service! Automated Production of Lug Assembly and Welding Realized at Wuhu Shipyard

Recently, Wuhu Shipyard has achieved a breakthrough in its smart manufacturing transformation. The jointly developed automatic lug assembly and welding workstation has been put into operation, successfully realizing automated production of lug-type components.

Lugs are critical safety components in ship construction and lifting operations. During processes such as hull construction, launching, and outfitting, cranes must rely on lugs to lift and turn hull blocks. Consequently, lugs are subject to extremely stringent standards in design, manufacturing, and inspection.

The newly commissioned automatic lug assembly and welding workstation achieves a fully automated process for lug-type components, from raw material feeding, identification and positioning, automatic assembly, and automated welding to finished product unloading. Compared with traditional manual assembly and welding, this system increases production efficiency by more than three times, boosts welding speed by over 60%, maintains a product qualification rate of over 99%, and delivers excellent consistency in weld quality. It also provides full-process quality traceability, effectively addressing industry pain points such as reliance on worker skill levels, high quality fluctuations, and limited production capacity.

The workstation is centered on "unmanned operation, intelligent recognition, and rapid changeover." Equipped with an intelligent vision recognition system, it can automatically identify randomly placed lug raw materials without requiring precise manual positioning or pre-treatment. Additionally, the equipment supports rapid changeover between more than eight different types of lugs. The changeover process requires no manual adjustment of tooling or parameters and can be completed within minutes, greatly enhancing the responsiveness to multi-variety, small-batch orders.

The successful commissioning of this automatic lug welding workstation marks another breakthrough in Wuhu Shipyard's smart manufacturing strategy. Since launching its first five-year smart manufacturing plan in 2019, Wuhu Shipyard has steadily advanced its intelligent transformation, successively building advanced facilities such as the domestic shipbuilding industry's first intelligent blanking, sorting, chamfering, and beveling production line, an automated pipe processing production line (winner of Anhui Province Industrial Design Gold Award), and multi-level automated welding production lines. These efforts have gradually formed an intelligent production system covering key processes, achieving an organic integration of labor savings, cost reduction, and efficiency improvement. Looking ahead to a new stage of development, Wuhu Shipyard will continue to deepen its smart manufacturing capabilities with firmer steps and more cutting-edge technology, making innovation the core engine that drives the company steadily forward toward the vast blue ocean.