BCBusiness

Meet seven B.C. companies that are pushing the boundaries of robotics by Scott Neufeld MATRIX Robo Crop 20 BCBUSINESS NOVEMBER 2017 R obots are on the move in B.C., if you know where to look. A mix of established veterans and promising startups, the province's robotics compa- nies are doing everything from delving into undersea explora- tion to teaching machines how to think like people. Some have become acquisition targets, a trend highlighted by camera maker Point Grey Research, a leader in machine vision, which Oregon-based Flir Systems Inc. bought for $253 million last year. These businesses o†er a glimpse of how lucrative the B.C. robotics industry could be if we devoted more ener‡y to bring- ing it to life. "I tell everybody I know, we produce half per capita the number of engineers that our peer provinces do," says Elizabeth Croft, a UBC professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Collaborative Advanced Robotics and Intel- ligent Systems laboratory. "If you don't produce engineers, you won't have robotics companies. You need people in computing and AI, and I think people are waking up to that investment." It's a chicken-and-egg prob- lem: B.C. desperately needs an anchor tenant to take its robotics industry to the next level, but major players won't come unless they see a stable supply of sta†. "You're going to have to produce more engineers to create the tal- ent pool to attract the companies to develop that virtuous circle of developing the economy around robotics," Croft says, noting that though B.C. has limited potential for manufacturing automation, other industries o†er fertile ground. "There are amazing opportunities, and one of them is mining." 1. INTERNATIONAL SUBMARINE ENGINEERING LTD. HEADQUARTERS: Port Coquitlam LAUNCHED: 1974 FOUNDER: James McFarlane EMPLOYEES: 100 FINANCIALS: $10 million to $25 million in annual sales ORIGIN STORY: After 18 years with the Canadian Armed Forces, McFarlane retired and launched ISE BREAKTHROUGH: In 1983, the firm unveiled the first autonomous underwater vehicle to submerge solo. ISE subs became sought- after worldwide for gathering deep-sea data, including informa- tion to support Canada's claim to Arctic sovereignty CUSTOMERS: The U.S. and Canadian navies, oceanographic research organizations like the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, commercial clients like Shell Oil Co. and government agencies such as NASA 2. NOVARC TECHNOLOGIES HEADQUARTERS: North Vancouver LAUNCHED: 2013 FOUNDERS: Reza Abdollahi and Soroush Karimzadeh EMPLOYEES: 13 FINANCIALS: Raised $1 million this year in a seed round with Seaspan ULC and Business Development Bank of Canada participating ORIGIN STORY: Motivated by the global shortage of qualified pipe welders, engineers Abdollahi and Karimzadeh developed a process to automate such work BREAKTHROUGH: Novarc has built what it calls the world's first collaborative welding robot, the Spool Welding Robot, which could not only lower the cost of pipe welding but make less-skilled welders more productive CUSTOMERS: Mainly pipe shops servicing industries including oil and gas, shipbuilding, chemical plants, water and wastewater facilities, and nuclear and other power plants 3. KINDRED SYSTEMS INC. HEADQUARTERS: San Francisco LAUNCHED: 2014 FOUNDERS: Geordie Rose, Suzanne Gildert, James Bergstra, Graham Taylor, George Babu, Ajay Agrawal EMPLOYEES: 45 (7 in B.C.) FINANCIALS: US$14 million raised from investors including Bloomberg Beta, First Round Capital and Google Ventures ORIGIN STORY: Gildert and Rose moved on from Burnaby quantum computer maker D-Wave Systems 1 2 7 5 42%

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