Company: Helsinki Shipyard (DNY Finland Oy)
Industry: Shipbuilding / Heavy industry
Location: Helsinki, Finland
Cobot System: Universal Robots UR12e with SmoothTool, EWM welding power source and Hypertherm plasma cutter, configured for hybrid welding and plasma cutting
Cobot Welding Comes to a 160-Year-Old Shipyard
Helsinki Shipyard has been a fixture in Finnish industry since 1865. Over its 160-year history, the yard has carried many names, including Masa-Yards and Finnyards, and is today known as DNY Finland Oy after the Canadian Davie Group acquired the business at the end of 2023. The Helsinki Shipyard name lives on as the brand most people still recognise. The yard sits almost in the centre of Helsinki, which is quite an unusual address for a shipbuilder. Over the years its footprint has grown more compact, but the company has stayed put. Its core activity is tied to building everything from large cruise ships to the ice-going vessels it has become known for in recent years: icebreakers and ice-class research cruisers built for some of the harshest conditions on earth.
– Juha-Pekka Keltanen, Welding Engineer in
We invest in new construction, which is our core business. And alongside that, we also do ship repair projects when possible.
Helsinki Shipyard
A Common Myth About Shipyards
When people picture welding inside a shipyard, they tend to picture huge ship blocks being joined together: the kind of work that calls for heavy manipulators, conveyors, and a lot of manual welders. That part of the operation is real, but it is far from the whole story. Jussi Martiskin from ProWeld Finland, the integrator behind the Helsinki Shipyard installation, has seen the same misconception in workshop after workshop:
Many people think that at a shipyard only large blocks are welded together, and that you need manual welding equipment or light conveyors. But there are many small parts: piping, prefabricated parts, all sorts of things made at the shipyard, just like in other workshops. So a cobot is just as suitable for a shipyard as for any other workshop.
– Jussi Martiskin, ProWeld Finland
Helsinki Shipyard fabricates piece goods, pipe prefabrications, and a wide variety of sheet-metal components in-house. It is exactly the kind of mix that defines almost any modern workshop, which is repetitive but varied, with a steady pull on the most skilled and experienced welders. The question is the same one any production manager will recognise: how do you free your people from the most repetitive runs so they can spend their time where they make the biggest difference?
Why a Hybrid Cobot Welding and Plasma Cutting Solution Made Sense for a Shipyard
The path to cobot welding at Helsinki Shipyard started with a trial. A cobot station equipped with both welding equipment and plasma cutting equipment was brought in for a couple of weeks of testing. From there, the case for investment built quickly.
For Juha-Pekka, the team wanted three things from automation:
- Flexibility. The workshop produces a wide mix of parts: piece goods, pipe prefabrications, and sheet metal. Whatever the team invested in had to handle that range, not lock production into a single product line.
- Resilience in staffing. Skilled welders are getting harder to find (a global welder shortage), and a cobot’s short learning curve helps offset that. “It is good in that sense, because users can be trained quite quickly to use the cobot,” Juha-Pekka notes.
- Quality and standardisation. On the welding side especially, the team wanted the kind of repeatability that only an automated tool can deliver.
The hybrid configuration closed the deal. One station handles both plasma cutting and welding, with a quick changeover between torches and settings. As Jussi Martiskin at ProWeld explains, that was the point of the design from the beginning:
The idea was that you could switch the torch and station settings between these processes very quickly. For example, after cutting the pieces, you can weld them in the same place. There’s no need to move the pieces anywhere.
At a shipyard, this hybrid application is good because you can do both welding and plasma cutting with the same device, which increases its utilisation rate and makes it a more sensible investment.
– Jussi Martiskin, ProWeld Finland
Crucially, the same operating logic in SmoothTool covers both processes. As Jussi also notes, anyone who can program a plasma cut on the cobot can also program a weld and vice versa. That keeps training simple, removes the need for separate cutting and welding operators, and lets a single person take a part from raw stock to finished assembly without it ever leaving the station.
| Curious how a hybrid cobot setup could fit into your production? Download the Product Sheet or request a demo. |
From Delivery to First Production Parts in About an Hour
One concern about bringing automation into a long-established workshop is always disruption. At Helsinki Shipyard, it never materialised.
After delivery, it took maybe an hour or an hour and a half before the first production parts were cut. So in that sense, implementation was quite fast and convenient.
– Juha-Pekka Keltanen, Welding Engineer in Helsinki Shipyard
The reception inside the workshop followed a familiar arc: a moment of unfamiliarity, then real curiosity, then engagement. Juha-Pekka notes that a new cobot station inevitably causes some initial confusion when it arrives, but interest takes over quickly, and the operators using the stations have been consistently satisfied. A big part of that, he says, is the software:
The SmoothTool software is very easy to use. Anyone can learn it. That was also a big reason why we chose these stations, because they are very user-friendly.
Today, two to four operators are actively using the cobot station each day. The first runs have focused on piece goods and sheet-metal parts. The next horizon is pipe prefabrications, including T-branch insertions and similar joints, where SmoothTool’s ongoing software development is making programming faster still.
Standardised Welds for High-Strength and Ice-Class Steels
For a shipyard working with high-strength steels and ice-class vessels, welding quality is not a nice-to-have. The window of successful welding parameters narrows the stronger the steel, and getting it wrong is costly.
Juha-Pekka points to the cobot’s ability to standardise the essential variables as the practical answer: transport speed stays constant, torch angles are set as standard, free wire length stays consistent, and the welding process can be precisely adjusted. That precision matters most on stronger steels, where the parameter window is narrower than on basic steels, and it is exactly where the cobot proves its worth as a tool for achieving consistent weld joints.
On the plasma side, the cobot replaces older oxy-acetylene cutting that left a lot of grinding and finishing work behind. Jussi Martiskin sees the impact every time he commissions a new station. Plasma delivers a cleaner cut than the traditional method, which significantly reduces finishing work and improves throughput. The ergonomic gain is just as real: where a welder or pipefitter used to cut a part and then spend serious time grinding it to get the surface quality and fits right, plasma now produces the result in one pass, leaving only a quick wipe before welding begins.
Throughput, ergonomics, and consistency all improve in a single change.
Faster Production, Smarter Design, and Top Marks for SmoothTool
The cobot has clearly made cutting and welding more efficient at Helsinki Shipyard. The cutting process moves faster, the finished result is in a different league from manual work, and post-processing is reduced. Across a full job, the time savings add up.
The team has also started to think differently about design. Components that lend themselves to cobot production are flagged and prioritised, and once a part has a saved program, scaling up is straightforward. Pipe-flange assemblies, for example, can be welded once, then modified and re-run in different sizes with simple program adjustments.
Asked about Smooth Robotics as a partner, Juha-Pekka scores SmoothTool a perfect 10. The support has been strong, the team’s specific requirements have been taken into account, and product development feels directed at the workshop’s actual processes.
What’s Next: More Cobots, More Integration
The hybrid cobot station now in the workshop is a start, but there is more to come.
This cobot station will probably be integrated with other workshop equipment in the future, and we will consider increasing automation in many ways. It is not out of the question that more cobots will be acquired later. With these two [setups], we can at least get started…
– Juha-Pekka Keltanen, Welding Engineer in Helsinki Shipyard
The Takeaway: Big Production Has Repetitive Work Too
Helsinki Shipyard’s story is a reminder that the size of a production line says less about its fit for cobot automation than the nature of the work happening inside it. Shipyards, like any other workshop, are full of recurring, repetitive welding and cutting tasks that wear down skilled people and bottleneck delivery.
Putting a hybrid cobot station in the middle of that work does not replace shipbuilding craftsmanship. One device welds and cuts, with one operating logic and one operator, and it frees the craftspeople to spend their time on the parts of the job that only they can do.
Curious how SmoothTool could fit into your production? Download the Product Sheet or request a demo.
Is a Cobot Welder Suitable for a Shipyard? (FAQ)
Yes. Although shipyards are best known for welding large blocks together, a major share of the work consists of small, repetitive pieces: piping, pipe prefabrication, sheet-metal parts, brackets, and flanges. These fit naturally on a cobot station. Helsinki Shipyard uses a hybrid cobot welder and plasma cutter from Smooth Robotics for exactly this kind of work.
A hybrid cobot station combines welding and plasma cutting on the same cobot, with a quick torch changeover and a shared operating logic in SmoothTool. One operator can cut and weld a part at the same station, raising utilisation and eliminating part transfer between machines.
Cobot welding with SmoothTool standardises travel speed, torch angles and free wire length, which is especially valuable on high-strength and ice-class steels where the window of successful welding parameters is narrower than with mild steel.
At Helsinki Shipyard, the first production parts were cut/welded about an hour to an hour and a half after the cobot station was delivered. Implementation is fast because cobots do not require safety cages or extensive site preparation.
Key Takeaways
- Cobot welding fits big production too. Shipyards produce a constant stream of small parts, including piping, prefabricated components, and sheet-metal pieces, that are ideal candidates for cobot automation.
- Hybrid welding + plasma cutting raises utilisation. One station handles both processes, with quick torch changeovers and the same operating logic in SmoothTool. This makes it a more sensible investment than two single-purpose machines.
- Fast implementation. First production parts cut about an hour after delivery.
- Standardised quality for demanding steels. Constant transport speed, torch angles and free wire length deliver consistent welds, especially important on high-strength steels used in ice-class vessels.
- Easier training, smaller skill bottleneck. Operators can be brought up to speed quickly with SmoothTool, easing the pressure on hard-to-fill welder roles.
- Better ergonomics, less rework. Cleaner plasma cuts mean less grinding; the cobot takes over the most repetitive runs.
The Helsinki Shipyard installation was delivered in partnership with ProWeld Finland.
The solution consists of a hybrid cobot station from Smooth Robotics, combining a Universal Robots cobot with SmoothTool, EWM power source and Hypertherm plasma cutting machine for welding and plasma cutting.
Helsinki Shipyard (DNY Finland Oy) is part of the Davie Group and has been building ships in central Helsinki since 1865. Its recent focus is on ice-going vessels, specifically icebreakers and ice-class research cruisers.
Learn more about Helsinki Shipyard: helsinkishipyard.fi