Spider-legged welding robot: how staged protection tames arc-welding EMI

lukas_m_ziegler · x · 2026-09-27

A deep dive into Diden Robotics' spider-legged welding robot reveals a core engineering challenge: arc strikes produce momentary multi-kilovolt surges that couple through air and the steel structure, shifting the ground reference so correctly-sent signals get misread, triggering communication errors or control board resets.

Protection can't be solved with a single component — one sized to absorb arc surge energy is too slow for short switching pulses, while a fast component destroys itself on surge energy. The solution is staged protection, each stage stepping energy down to a level the next can handle.

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