The National Shipbuilding Research Program project "Remote Climbing Robot for Automated Welding Processes" has developed a mobile, autonomous, robotic welding platform that can replace fixed-track-based devices resulting in a substantial savings in time, set-up requirements, safety and overall cost in Naval ship construction (50-70% cost savings per job for typical erection joint welds). The team used existing proven climbing robot technology by developing and integrating a non-contact weld-seam tracking and feature extraction sensor system coupled with a novel navigation and welding control algorithm.