IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Trois-Rivières, May 2, 2019 – AGT Robotics, the Trois-Rivières-based company, received the Technology Innovation of the Year Award from FANUC, the world’s largest manufacturer of industrial robots. This award is an acknowledgment from the industry for the most innovative product or project of the year in the Americas and is awarded by a jury of peers, all robot system integrators, from among several hundred projects. AGT stood out from some twenty finalists thanks to its BeamMaster and its Cortex software. Winning this award is also a story of David vs. Goliath, in which AGT, a small business from Trois-Rivières, prevails over companies with several thousand employees.

The BeamMaster is a robotic system dedicated to welding steel structures. The structural steel industry is greatly in need of an innovative solution for its welding applications. Indeed, the challenges facing this industry are well known. Together with a lack of skilled labor, the unique appearance of each manufactured part makes standard robotic welding solutions unusable. AGT’s Cortex software is designed to meet this very challenge.

Cortex bridges the gap between welding robots and the steel structure designers. Cortex can retrieve 3D information from an architectural drawing and automatically generate the weld seams without any human intervention; it can generate all the program points necessary for the welding tool, automatically determine the correct welding procedure to be applied, define all robot movements (without collisions), and plan the sequence of all the operations that the robot will perform.

“Sometimes we forget that in order to perform a task, an industrial robot must be programed. Using the robot’s programming console, a robotic welding routine for a column with about ten accessories can easily take several hours of programming. With Cortex, the task is automatically performed for hundreds of parts at a time and will only take a few minutes per part,” adds Louis Dicaire, General Manager and Joint Shareholder of AGT.