FANUC brings magnet-mount welding cobots and an AI agent that reads handwritten work orders to FABTECH 2026
FANUC America said on October 5 that its FABTECH 2026 booths will show welding, plasma cutting, laser and paint automation aimed at fabricators. The FABTECH debut of its CRX-3iA cobot is the headline for structural shops: it weighs 11 kg, handles 3 kg payloads and mounts straight onto structural steel with a magnetic base, bringing robotic vertical-up welding to shipbuilding and large structural fabrication. Other demos include building weld programs from a scan, robotic plasma cutting set up through Shape Generation 3 software with a Hypertherm interface, and a 500 kg-payload robot working with two ARC Mate robots on excavator-bucket welds. FANUC will also show a Gemini Enterprise AI agent, running on Google Cloud, that reads handwritten work orders captured by a robot's camera, works out the parts and quantities, and generates picking instructions for a second robot.
What it means for manufacturers and fabricators
Welding automation is moving off the fixed cell and onto the beam itself, and AI is starting to handle the paperwork in between, like turning a scribbled work order into a pick list.