Samsung Heavy Industries announced at its 50th shareholder meeting on March 21st that the company will lead the innovation of the shipbuilding industry model with groundbreaking automation, and build itself into a futuristic shipyard with 24-hour unmanned and automated operation centered on robots. Cui Cheng'an, Vice President of Samsung Heavy Industry, said at the shareholders' meeting, "The company will formulate standards for future shipyards, and at the same time, in order to consolidate market control, will make every effort to achieve the autonomy of core technologies and create new added value."
In recent years, Samsung Heavy Industries has made significant progress by implementing the "Smart Samsung Heavy Industries" digital transformation strategy, accelerating the transformation of automated and unmanned operations in shipbuilding processes. The company's forklift responsible for handling heavy materials has adopted unmanned technology in 2022. Subsequently, in September 2023, the company developed a laser high-speed welding robot suitable for thin film cargo hold welding operations and put it into production site use. Compared with the existing plasma arc welding (PAW) method, the speed of this laser high-speed welding robot can be increased by about 5 times, which is expected to significantly improve the construction efficiency of LNG transport ships and reduce production costs. Meanwhile, Samsung Heavy Industries also plans to launch miniaturized and lightweight welding robots that can move and work in any workplace, gradually replacing traditional manual welding.
In addition, Samsung Heavy Industry is also focusing on promoting the intelligence of production systems such as the Internet of Things and data automation technology, and improving production efficiency through office automation technologies such as robot processing automation (RPA). In the field of chatbots, Samsung Heavy Industry is also at the forefront of the industry. After developing and applying AI based conversational design chatbots (ChatBot) in 2022, it announced the development of a new type of chatbot "SBOT" for ship design and other work in 2023, and plans to connect "SBOT" with the chatbot program "ChatGPT" developed by OpenAI in the United States to improve chatbot service capabilities.
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