Vulcanexus supports VITAWELD in bringing intuitive robotic tool delivery to smart manufacturing

Within the European ARISE project, VITAWELD demonstrates how Vulcanexus and eProsima middleware technologies can support real industrial Human-Robot Interaction, helping mobile robots assist workers safely, naturally, and efficiently on the factory floor.

ARISE is a European initiative focused on making industrial Human-Robot Interaction more accessible, cost-effective, and trustworthy for sectors such as healthcare, intra-logistics, and manufacturing. Through its FSTP experiments, different projects are developing practical use cases that explore how open middleware, reusable robotics components, and human-centric design can accelerate the adoption of advanced automation in Europe.

One of these projects is VITAWELD: Vision & Human-Robot Teaming for Enhanced Welding, a project focused on transforming industrial welding operations through AI-driven, vision-based human-robot interaction. The project aims to make robotic welding more accessible for non-expert users by reducing the need for advanced robot programming knowledge and consolidating the welding workflow into a single HRI layer.

What is VITAWELD about?

VITAWELD addresses one of the key challenges in robotic welding: enabling operators to configure, supervise, and monitor welding tasks without relying on several disconnected tools such as CAD software, offline programming environments, robot teach pendants, and welding power-source interfaces.

Led by Rovimatica S.L. and IDONIAL, the project brings together robotics, computer vision, welding expertise, and real industrial validation facilities. Its demonstrator consists of an integrated robotic welding cell where the operator interacts with the system through a unified web-based conversational interface. This interface guides the user through the complete welding process, including workpiece selection, weldable-region definition, positioning, welding-parameter configuration, trajectory generation, robot motion execution, and weld-quality review.

In this type of environment, reliable communication is essential. The system must coordinate robot motion, AI orchestration, computer vision, operator interaction, safety monitoring, welding-process data, and quality information while keeping the human operator in control of the final decisions.

How Vulcanexus fits into VITAWELD

VITAWELD uses ROS 2 and Vulcanexus as the main communication backbone for robot, sensing, and HRI components. In the final demonstrator, the architecture was simplified by removing the intermediate ZeroMQ-based bridge used during the MVP stage and adopting direct DDS-based communication as the main internal integration mechanism. This reduced architectural complexity, improved alignment with the ARISE middleware approach, and made the system more suitable for deployment in the real robotic welding cell.

The project also uses a FIWARE-based local cloud layer to acquire, store, and visualize welding-process information such as voltage, current, wire speed, warning states, stop states, and related monitoring data. This allows process information to be displayed through Grafana dashboards and made available for traceability and later analytics.

What eProsima technologies provide

For VITAWELD, eProsima technologies provide the DDS-native communication layer needed to connect distributed robotic, sensing, monitoring, and HRI modules in a cleaner and more interoperable way. The demonstrator relies on a ROS 2 / Vulcanexus communication backbone, with Fast DDS supporting communication between the main components.

The use of DDS-based communication helps reduce unnecessary translation layers and supports a more standardised architecture. In the final implementation, the project also uses a DDS Router with an explicit allowlist of topics for FIWARE integration, avoiding the exposure of the full ROS 2 discovery space to external monitoring components.

For the VITAWELD architecture, this means more reliable data exchange between the conversational assistant, task-specific tools, robot-control modules, safety components, quality-inspection modules, and industrial monitoring layers.

A real use case for intelligent tool delivery

The VITAWELD demonstrator has been deployed and tested at IDONIAL’s facilities in a real industrially relevant robotic welding cell. The setup includes actual welding equipment and representative process conditions, rather than a purely simulated environment.

The demonstrator has reached TRL 6, showing a system/subsystem prototype demonstrated in a relevant environment. Validation was performed under controlled pilot conditions in a real welding cell, allowing the team to safely observe system behaviour while testing the transition from a simulation-based MVP to a physical HRI-enabled robotic welding demonstrator.

Its capabilities include natural-language interaction, LLM-driven orchestration, weld-line selection, welding-parameter configuration, automatic trajectory generation, robot motion execution, weld-quality detection, work-area safety monitoring, gesture-based stop commands, and real-time process visualization.

Supporting the future of collaborative manufacturing

VITAWELD is a strong example of how open middleware and industrial robotics technologies can help make robotic welding more accessible, transparent, and human-centred. By combining AI-powered computer vision, natural-language interaction, ROS 2 / Vulcanexus communication, ROS4HRI-compatible perception outputs, FIWARE monitoring, and real welding-cell validation, the project creates a foundation for robotic welding systems that are easier to configure and supervise.

For eProsima, VITAWELD showcases how Vulcanexus and DDS-based technologies can support complex industrial robotics workflows where multiple software layers, sensing systems, robot modules, and operator interfaces must work together reliably.

For the ARISE ecosystem and the companies behind VITAWELD, the project demonstrates how reusable, interoperable, and human-in-the-loop robotics components can accelerate the adoption of advanced automation in manufacturing, not by replacing welding expertise, but by making robotic welding easier to use, safer to supervise, and more traceable in real industrial environments.