AGT Robotics Wins Innovation Award

AGT Robotics (Trois-Rivières, QC) received the Technology Innovation of the Year Award from FANUC America Corporation (Rochester Hill, MI) as an acknowledgment from the industry for the most innovative product or project of the year in the Americas. It is awarded by a jury of peers, all robot system integrators, from among several hundred projects. Their company stood out from some 20 finalists thanks to their BeamMaster robotic system and its Cortex software. Winning this award is also a story of David vs. Goliath, where a small business from Trois-Rivières prevails over larger companies with several thousand employees.

The structural steel industry is greatly in need of an innovative solution for 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. The BeamMaster system is dedicated to welding steel structures. Cortex software is designed to meet this very challenge, bridging the gap between welding robots and the steel structure designers. The software 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 programmed. 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, this task is automatically performed for hundreds of parts at a time and will only take a few minutes per part,” explained Louis Dicaire, the general manager and joint shareholder of AGT.

“We are very pleased to receive this award, which once again demonstrates our company’s leadership and innovation in robotics,” said Éric Bélanger, the president of AGT. “Our success is simply the result of a team of passionate people.”

“FANUC works in partnership with leading integrators in their sector. For AGT, this is arc welding. They have proven to be an outstanding systems integrator in their industry by providing their demanding customers with complex solutions,” said Norbert Boch, the sales director at FANUC Canada. “We would like to express our gratitude for their continued commitment by presenting them with the 2019 Innovation Award.”

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