[DoctorDabadedoo]

That would fall under the "automation" category: a very specialized customized application of robotics, doing the same set of tasks over and over, this is the kind of application where we can really see the power of robotics, but rest assured that countless hours were spent testing/improving/optimizing/safe guarding these workflows and after every section in an assembly line there will be manual inspection to flag for bad / missing weldings and potential service of the machinery involved.

[gertlex]

Would "single purpose robot" be another reasonable term for welding robots? Just musing.

The earlier "when compared to humans" statement definitely sounds pretty accurate to me, worded as "mutli-purpose robots currently always are less robust than humans at the same set of tasks" (or similar)

[pixl97]

>mutli-purpose robots currently always are less robust than humans at the same set of tasks

Specialization has tradeoffs. Humans are very optimized generalists but very few of us become specialist at more than one thing. Even in that case a specialized machine/robot can be far faster, depending on the task of course.

Of course humans have a lot of trade offs for their abilities as generalists... taking years to mature, requiring sleep, poor integration with computer systems are just some of them.