You mean seam tracking? Haven't used it much myself, but from what I've seen around the development lab it looks like a very useful piece of kit, especially for laser welding. In a perfect world, of course, we'd just make our fixed tooling to hold the parts properly and do away with the need for intelligent processes like seam tracking. But in the real world, we have to deal with inconsistent sheet metal, and will probably have to do so increasingly as time goes on and producers look for ways to reduce cost, increase speed, and start requiring greater accuracy from their weld processes.
If you're referring to KUKA's own seam-tracking technology package, from what I've seen, it works quite well as long as you:
A: use the correct hardware -- the biggest headaches I see are when a customer takes a technology package designed for using certain types of welders and heads, and insists on using it with their own favorite hardware that's not supported.
B: design the process intelligently. You'd be amazed how many end users think that, just because the robot has a vision system or something like seam tracking on board, that they can just design their process with all sorts of long reaches, crazy angles, and impossible speeds. I once had to work on a MIG-welding system that included filling a hole... with the weld tip
perfectly inverted -- the opening of the shielding gas nozzle was pointed straight up into the weld. And they couldn't understand why they had to keep changing nozzles all the time....
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