Eli5 how come welding is so tough to automate (how come there's lots of welders, but factory work was automated)
EngineeringWhy spend untold amounts of money on a robot when there are still plenty of people who will just go do that stuff?
How much money is a life worth?
(Fun fact, corporations have answered this question. A life is typically worth ~2 million dollars. That's generally how much corporations have to pay out when someone dies.)
The pay is extremely high and while it is dangerous, they're extremely prepared and equipped to deal with that danger, so people voluntarily do it as their career. It's not like they sacrifice someone on a suicide mission every time a repair needs to be done.
Robots would need to get a lot smarter than they are before anyone even entertains the idea of making one for non-standard repairs. A shitty weld can kill more people than just the person making it.
I could see some kind of submersible drone welder being viable for some situations, but that really depends on what and where the damage is.
I work with machinery designed to do inspection on nuclear components. Where a human cannot realistically survive long enough to inspect the component due to radiation.
It is insanely difficult to design the robot to perform the inspection as if it was a human just passing a probe to check the component. Where if the component is not radioactive, a human can perform the inspection in just several hours, a robot can be insanely tricky to mimic the movements or have it be able to for simple things like changing a tool, it has to carry it and have it be able to change it on the fly without human intervention. The exponential nature of how many different tasks you have to perform reliably in one single machine makes this very very difficult to pull off.
Humans are very good at single unique and varied tasks and very bad at single simple repetitive tasks.