With approximately 20% of the world capacity, the European shipbuilding industry provides over 100,000 jobs through direct employment and generates at least three times as many jobs in the marine equipment and service industries across the continent.
However, to remain competitive in a global market dominated by South Korea, China and Japan, there is an urgent need for the European shipbuilding industry to adopt advanced technologies, invest on research and development and implement innovative production methods. This includes automatic welding of ship hulls.
In particular, enhancing 
the welding processes of ship hulls represents a significant challenge as most of these processes are currently performed manually presenting high uncertainty in process repeatability and posing great health and safety risks to operators.
To address this challenge, a partnership of six organisations (2 research centres, 1 shipbuilding multi-national company and 3 universities) from four nations with coastlines on the Atlantic Ocean has combined efforts to move the region’s shipbuilding sector into the 21st century by developing SHIPWELD project - Automatic Welding Process for Shipbuilding Industry that focuses on automated welding processes for hulls.
