Manufacturers everywhere are hunting for skilled welders, and Tate decided to stop waiting for the labor market to catch up. Instead of doubling down on traditional hand welding, the company rolled out a fleet of 58 Hirebotics Cobot Welder systems across its facilities in Arkansas, Virginia and Kentucky — a move announced on August 6, 2026.
This isn’t a one-off pilot bolted onto a corner of the shop floor. It’s a full production network, built around cloud connectivity so that dozens of welding cells can be managed, monitored and updated as a single agile system rather than 58 isolated machines.
At the heart of each unit sits a UR10e robot arm from Universal Robots, paired with Hirebotics’ Beacon software. Beacon lives in the cloud, which is the clever part: operators program and supervise the welders through a connected interface, and the whole deployment can be orchestrated remotely across three states. For a company juggling multiple plants, that centralized visibility is arguably as valuable as the welding itself.
On the performance side, the Cobot Welder is no slouch. The system moves at a maximum speed of roughly 39 inches per second and can lay down welds at up to 90 inches per minute. That’s fast enough to keep pace with real production schedules, not just showroom demos — and consistent enough to sidestep the fatigue and variability that come with long human welding shifts.
The appeal of a collaborative robot here is precisely that it’s collaborative. Cobots are designed to work alongside people rather than behind safety cages, which lowers the barrier to automating tasks that used to demand a dedicated, hard-to-hire specialist. For Tate, that means existing staff can be retrained to load, supervise and fine-tune the cells instead of spending their careers holding a torch.
None of this comes cheap. The Hirebotics Cobot Welder starts at US$105,000 per system, so a 58-unit rollout represents a serious capital commitment. But that’s rather the point of the story: Tate is betting that a cloud-connected, scalable welding network pays for itself through throughput and reliability in a market where qualified welders are increasingly hard to find.
- Robot arm: UR10e
- Software: cloud-based Beacon
- Max speed: ~39 inches per second
- Weld rate: up to 90 inches per minute
- Starting price: US$105,000
- Deployment: 58 units across Arkansas, Virginia and Kentucky
What makes the Tate deployment worth watching is the scale. Plenty of shops dabble with a single cobot welder to see how it fits. Committing 58 of them across a multi-state footprint is a statement that cloud-connected welding automation has graduated from experiment to infrastructure.
