During the winter 2003/2004 a new research group MIA (Mecatronics in Industrial Applications) was formed at HTU (University of Trollhättan/Uddevalla). One of the primary research areas of the group is to develop an automatic robotised metal deposition. Metal deposition is a method where a metal feature is built by adding welding material to create the wanted shape. A common way to build a part is to add material by powder or wire. The material is melted using a heat source, e.g. a tungsten electrode (TIG welding equipment) or laser. The idea of the method is to building up layers to create the wanted products or add metal features, like flanges, bosses and pads, to existing products. As one of the first steps of the research a patent search have been conducted which aimed at finding patents for metal deposition and sensor system used to control the metal deposition process. The search resulted in 17 patents where most of the patents can be classified into the more general type of patents and only two can be classified for control and sensor system. During the search of patents the search had to be narrowed using more search words. The reason was that a search with “wide” and few words generated such amount of patents so it was impossible to look into the information. From the patents found only a few covered the use of control and sensor system for metal deposition. One way of explaining this is that the research is just in the beginning and that the MIA group has found an area that still have much yet to develop.