Working to bridge the development gap
In research centres across the country, it is sometimes called "the valley of death" -- the gap that developers must cross as they try to take promising prototypes out of university labs and into commercial production.
Helping Canadian companies to cross that bridge is Precarn Inc., an Ottawa-based, not-for-profit company that grants financial support to the precommercial development of leading-edge, innovative technology. It sits at the centre of a network of about 300 companies that make everything from fibre-optic sensors to vision systems.
"Studies show that our industrial sector is not doing nearly as much R&D as competitors in the U.S. and Japan," says Precarn's chief executive officer, Paul Johnston.
"Instead of developing their own, Canadian resource companies tend to acquire technologies offshore in countries like Sweden and Finland," he said.
That view is supported by a July 2004 federal government study that compared business spending on research and development among a list of OECD members and non-member countries. Canada ranked 15th on a list of 20 countries.
Precarn hopes to reverse that trend by stepping up its efforts to take new ideas and turn them into commercial products by facilitating a collaborative approach to research among companies, universities, and end users.
"The space in which we play is the valley of death," said Mr. Johnston.
Since it was formed in 1987, Precarn has focused mainly on financing the development of robotics and intelligent systems -- where machines are designed to mimic human reasoning and decision-making.
But because only about 400 Canadian companies are involved in that sector, it wants to expand into other areas such as nanotechnology and information and communications technologies. Currently, Precarn receives more requests for funding than it can handle, and ends up financing about 30 per cent of eligible projects. The funds it receives come mainly from the federal and provincial governments.
To qualify for Precarn funding, projects must demonstrate that they are sufficiently innovative, are capable of being commercially viable and have the potential to offer economic benefits to Canada.
The companies Precarn tends to get involved with typically have their own financial resources because the agency only provides up to 50 per cent of the financing that is needed at any stage of a project's development.
"The project will have reached a point where commercial money is available to turn a prototype into a product," Mr. Johnston said.
In the past 19 years, the agency has been involved in 209 research projects, involving 325 organizations and 20 universities.
They include a consortium that successfully developed a fibre-optics system to detect breaches in oil pipelines before they cause any environmental damage.
Two years ago, Precarn contributed $998,000 to that project, to help the consortium led by TISEC Inc. of Montreal and backed by Fibre Optic Systems Technology Inc. [Fox-Tek] of Toronto, the Centre for Mineral and Energy Technology (CANMET) and the University of Toronto.
The money enabled Fox-Tek and its partners to see whether the system they had developed actually worked in the real world.
More recently, Precarn agreed to fund a western Canadian consortium that is developing a robot to replace humans who do dangerous work on top of oil well service rigs.
The agency granted $500,000 to that consortium, which includes two British Columbia firms (Motion Metrics International Corp. and Roboweld Inc.) and Nabors Canada, a unit of Nabors Industries Ltd., which is based in Hamilton, Bermuda, and is one of the world's leading oil-well service companies.
Together, they are developing an autonomous robotic handling device, which is designed to do the work of derrickmen, an industry term for the men and women who stand on mobile oil-rig platforms, high above the ground. Their job is to reach out and grab and store long metal pipes when they are being winched out of working oil wells.
Derrickmen face the constant threat of lost fingers, strained backs, or even being killed on the job. That is why Nabors wanted to automate the process of storing pipes while the oil wells are being serviced.
"We hope to have a commercial product available within a year," said Shahram Tafazoli, the 39-year-old chief executive of Vancouver-based Motion Metrics, which has been contracted by Roboweld to develop the vision systems for the 2.5 metre-tall robot.
Mr. Johnston said Nabors and its partners qualified for funding because they could demonstrate all the attributes that Precarn looks for when it is deciding whether to lend its support under its small-companies program.
Motion Metrics has already developed a multicamera surveillance system that lets the operator of a huge earth-moving tractor see blind spots around the vehicle on a computer screen inside the cab.
That system has already been sold to some of the world's largest mining companies, including Phelps Dodge Corp., and Newmont Mining Corp., bringing in $2-million of annual revenue for Motion Metrics, which has 10 employees.
As a result of that track record, Precarn is confident that the funding that it is providing to Motion Metrics will allow it to expand its product offerings and compete in the international market once the robotic device is ready for commercial production.
The $500,000 is a small portion of the $20-million that Precarn received in 2005 from Paul Martin's Liberal government.
Now that almost all of that money has been deployed, Precarn is expected to seek another round of financing from Ottawa in the near future.
A Precarn spokesman said the $20-million is regarded as a "down payment" on the $150-million that the company had requested from Industry Canada.
Precarn recently earmarked $4-million to support small companies researching intelligent systems and robotics specifically.
Companies that will qualify for funding are typically Canadian-owned, with between five and 50 employees and revenues of between $500,000 and $10-million. With that $4-million sum, Precarn expects to fund six to eight projects depending on the size of each project.
"What we are doing is getting people to do more research by providing them with an incentive to put their own money on the table," he said.
Other Precarn projects
Precarn recently funded the following ideas, collaborating with numerous public and private sector entities:
Paper quality prediction
$795,000 invested. The project created an algorithm for bleaching in a pulp mill, and an experimental database defining the relationship between wood chips and resultant pulp quality.
Advanced traffic control system $928,000 invested. Developed new strategies for traffic-control systems that would deal with a range of conditions, accurately predict traffic patterns and optimize signal timing.
PETER KENNEDY
