Innovation Fall 2026

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” Something I don't think the average person realizes is just how difficult some of these welds are. Take an open-root, full-penetration TIG weld on stainless steel; it can take a welder two to three years of training to get to the point where they can do that reliably at X-ray quality. Jonny Van Dyck, P. Eng. Novarc SWR product manager Transitioning from static to adaptive robots One Vancouver-founded company, backed by investors including Seaspan and the Canadian federal government, believes that its history of building pipe welding robots has prepared its technology to solve challenging edge cases in welding. Novarc Technologies, founded in 2014, has spent over a decade creating welding robots. "We started with a few hundred square feet of space in Gastown, with the vision of helping pipe shops automate the pipe welding process," said Novarc CEO Soroush Karimzadeh, P.Eng. "Throughout our prototyping, we managed to introduce the world's first welding robot to the marketplace." This spool welding robot (SWR), designed to weld pipe spools together, worked “somewhat like a video game,” said Novarc SWR product manager Jonny Van Dyck, P.Eng. In the initial version of the product, the operator would use a controller or pendant, watch a live video of the weld on a screen, and manually control the weld process from a distance. “They’re adjusting motion up and down, left and right, watching the puddle and arc length, tweaking voltage and other parameters in real time to accomplish the weld,” said Van Dyck. The Novarc team then turned to more autonomous solutions. "Customers were always asking us for a more hands-off operator experience, where the operator could set it up. But then they didn't want to necessarily be making changes on the fly during the weld," said Karimzadeh. One major feature was an assist mode, which bundled more linked operations together and allowed for

A NovAI camera and computing system is mounted to a Yaskawa six-axis robot. P hoto : W endy D P hotography

smoother operation. "For example, if a welder wanted to address fit-up variations or geometry changes, we designed controls that would encapsulate the necessary adjustments," said Ahmad Ashoori, P.Eng., Novarc's Senior Director of Robotics. "A welder might feel that the weld is not right or the arc intensity was not good, and they could simply press a button to correct it." Seaspan uses Novarc's spool welding robots, equipped with assist mode, at its Vancouver drydock facilities. Multimodal data in design These increased functionalities prompted Novarc to start collecting high-resolution data of weld pools. "With the spool-welding robot, we have accumulated more than 850,000 hours of arc-on time: actual welding time," said Novarc product manager Romario Gumulia, P.Eng. "Nobody else, as far as I know, has a welding video library like we do, because most people don't put welding cameras on every robot." Their growing library of data meant that Novarc was well-positioned to integrate computer vision in their more recent offerings. This led to the genesis of an

Innovation Fall 2026

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