Me and some pals have been putting together a spot welding robot, mainly for our own personal use, and we realized others might be interested. Originally the goal was to just get something simple that would work and not cost $50K+ as is typical on the market. That being said what we put together is more limited in scope, but due to the lowered cost maybe there's some people that would be interested. We're pretty far along in our design process, have the BOM mostly down, and have a good idea of the specs we can deliver.

http://i.imgur.com/CgI1iuW.png

* What: spot welding robot with MIG welder; numerical control programming interface

* Price: $16K base (lowest we think we can do it to retail)

* Technical specs:

    * Degrees of freedom: 6

    * Reach: 1250mm (1.25m base to tooltip)

    * End-effector Repeatability: 0.5mm

    * Gripper: default holding weld gun, can be changed/swapped (modular)

    * Payload capacity: 2 kg

    * End-effector speed: 1 m/s

    * Welder info: Lincoln MIG brand, for sheet metal thickness 1/64" to 11/64" (we can introduce higher tiers if people are interested)

Questions, comments, or suggestions? As I said, we're designing this for ourselves for basic sheet metal work, but realize that others may be interested as well, so we thought maybe we could bring something affordable to others as well =)

Cheers