This autonomous welding robot may be the future of advanced manufacturing

The United States’ advanced manufacturing future may have an unexpected limiting factor: a dire shortage of welders. While venture capital has placed big bets on a cutting-edge future of data centers, defense tech, and robotics, actually making the physical devices remains a challenge without finding the right talent to melt, fuse and repair metal. The American Welding Society projects that the country will need more than 320,000 new welding professionals by 2030, which means hiring about 80,000 new welders every year. 

Path Robotics believes the future of America’s manufacturing workforce will be augmented with torch-wielding robots. The Columbus, Ohio-based company, which is about to make a foray into the shipbuilding industry with Rove, a new welding robot mounted on the back of a Boston Dynamics’ quadruped, was born in 2018 from the founders’ frustration when they tried to start a custom vehicle company with their father, a family business that struggled to grow with a shortage of skilled labor. Demand for their ATVs and motorcycles wasn’t the issue; it was finding enough help to get the work done on time, and welding was one of the toughest roles to fill. 

“It was four grueling years seeing what it was truly like to try to stand up a U.S. manufacturing company, and it was extremely tough and ultimately ended with failure,” said Andy Lonsberry, CEO of Path Robotics who co-founded the firm with his brother Alex. “It gave us a deeply rooted passion and understanding for how difficult it truly is to be a small to medium-sized U.S. manufacturing firm, and that experience has stuck with us.”

The new Rove robot, a mobile version of the company’s massive, fixed welding cells—huge robotic arms attached to an industrial-strength torch—has a level of mobility and balance that make it ideal for settings like shipyards, where a traditional human welder needs to bounce around the site, and often lean or bend over to make welds a few feet off the ground or scaffold. It’s basically a torch mounted on top of the famous dog-like Boston Dynamics robot, with a hose connected to a fuel source. Once it saunters into place, the device’s robotic arm stretches into position, a laser scans the welding site, and then a torch ignites and closes a seam. 

It can make precise welds due to the company’s Obsidian AI system, which utilizes extensive training and testing—including practice on Path’s own training ground—to allow welding robots to adapt and move. Training an AI system to weld requires extensive data, says Lonsberry; there’s no room for error when the wrong connection can ruin a project. 

Instead of fixed, assembly-line style operation, or doing one motion a million times, Lonsberry says their technology seeks to do a million different moves one time each. 

“Robots have been involved in manufacturing for 50 years,” said Lonsberry. “But that’s mainly been in automotive, where they’re doing the same motion over and over again.

In addition to the company’s recent entry into shipbuilding (autonomous marine vessel company Saronic will be among the first to receive the new robots, which will officially hit the market in 2027 after beta testing) Path also sees a future for Rove in industries like AI data centers, in electrical energy infrastructure, and heavy construction, all unstructured construction environments with lots of variability. So far, Path has raised roughly $341 million, and employs more than 150 people at its Columbus headquarters, according to PitchBook.

Path’s fixed welding tech has also already a number of smaller firms across the Midwest thrive, including Millerbernd, a heavy-duty steel fabricator in Minnesota, Maystele, a Wisconsin company that does custom metalwork for data centers and other clients, and Indiana’s Deister, which works in the aggregate and mining industries. For Lonsberry and his brother, it’s about tapping into what he calls “tribal knowledge” of welding skills and manufacturing know-how while building up a new generation of small businesses. 

“People always ask why didn’t we go to Silicon Valley, that’s where the talent and genius is,” said Lonsberry. “For us, we want to build a company for manufacturing, with manufacturers, with them directly. We want to learn about their biggest pain points. We want to be a drive away versus a flight away. We want to be obsessed with, like, their actual outcomes. Yeah, so that’s why we decided to stay here.”