01 / SCAN
See the real part
Structured-light cameras capture the raw stock and fixture in under four seconds — as it actually sits, not as the drawing wishes it did. Warp, gap, and fit-up variance are measured, not assumed.
AI-Guided Robotic Fabrication · San Antonio, TX
The fabrication cell that programs itself.
Lodestar cells scan raw stock, generate their own toolpaths, and weld, cut, and finish production parts — no robot programmer on staff, no months of integration. Built for metal shops with more work than machinists.
- 3.4× machine-on time
- First parts in 14 days
- $0 upfront hardware
- 24/7 remote monitoring
Averages across active Lodestar fleets, trailing 12 months. Your numbers depend on part mix — we'll model yours in the demo.
Video slot — cell running
autoplay muted loop · 16:10 cover · ≤10s weld pass · poster set
The math every shop owner already knows
The work is there. The hands aren't.
Order books are full and quoting is brutal anyway — because every job you win still has to get past the same bottleneck: skilled fabricators you can't hire fast enough. The shops that grow through the next decade won't out-recruit the shortage. They'll out-automate it.
56
Average age of a certified welder-fabricator
Half the trade retires inside 12 years — and enrollment in fab programs isn't close to replacing them.
2.4:1
Open fabrication roles per qualified applicant
Poaching wages keep climbing. Training your own takes years — and they're recruited the day they're good.
7 wks
Typical quote-to-delivery backlog at capacity
Long lead times quietly hand your best customers a reason to qualify a second vendor.
The Lodestar system
One cell. Three moves.
A Lodestar cell works the way your best fabricator does — look at the part, think it through, run the pass — except it does the thinking in milliseconds, holds sub-millimeter accuracy on pass ten thousand, and never gets pulled onto another job.
02 / PLAN
Plan the path
TrueNorth™, our fabrication planner, generates the full toolpath — sequence, torch angles, feeds — and clears reach and collision checks before an arc ever strikes. No teach pendant, no offline programming seat.
03 / FABRICATE
Run — and adapt
The cell executes while sensors watch every pass, trimming feed and torch parameters in real time. Anything drifting out of tolerance is flagged before it leaves the cell — not found at final inspection.
The whole loop — scan, plan, first arc — takes less time than reading this section. Your team loads parts and approves plans from a tablet; ours watches fleet health around the clock from San Antonio. Watch it run on your drawings.
Fleet results
98.4%
First-pass yield
across all production cells
1.8M+
Production parts delivered
from customer cells since 2023
37%
Avg. cost-per-part reduction
measured against pre-Lodestar baselines
Fleet telemetry, trailing 12 months. Per-shop results in every demo — with the shop's permission, not cherry-picked.
Video slot — cells in action
muted loop · 16:9 cover · lazy data-src · ≤10s floor footage
Second shift at Hill Country Steelworks — one operator, three cells
Who runs Lodestar
From the front office to the floor.
“We quoted a job we'd have turned down flat last year — 1,100 weldments on a three-week window. The cell ran nights and weekends and we delivered four days early. That one PO paid for the quarter.”
Marcus Treviño VP of Operations, Hill Country Steelworks — New Braunfels, TX
“Honestly, I thought it was here to replace me. Turns out it's here to run the four hundred boring ones so I can put my hands on the twelve hard ones. I check its work on a tablet. It's never once checked mine.”
Denise Okafor Lead Fabricator, Rio Metalworks — Laredo, TX
Where cells are running
Built for the shops that build everything else.
Structural
Structural & misc. steel
Beams, embeds, stairs, and rail — high-mix weldments where fit-up never matches the model. Scanning first is the whole trick.
11 cells in the field
Energy
Energy & pipeline
Skids, spools, and pressure weldments with full per-pass parameter logs — traceability your QA team stops chasing by hand.
100% pass-level weld records
Heavy equipment
Heavy equipment & ag
Thick-plate buckets, frames, and booms. Long seams and heavy deposition are where around-the-clock arc time pays fastest.
3.9× deposition vs. manual shift
Job shops
Contract & job shops
Lot sizes of five, fifty, or five hundred. Self-programming means changeover is a scan, not a week of robot programming.
<20 min typical changeover
Book a demo
See your parts run.
Bring us three drawings. In a 45-minute working session we'll model cycle times, cost per part, and payback for your exact mix — then show you a live cell running comparable work. No slideware, no obligation.
Within driving distance? Come see the demo floor at our San Antonio facility — steel toes provided.
Prefer to talk first? Call (210) 555-0184, Mon–Fri 8am–6pm CT. You'll get an applications engineer, not a script.