The following is an excerpt from an article published on Canadian Business, written by Novarc CEO Soroush Karimzadeh
Around 700,000 tradespeople are expected to retire by 2028 and our young people are not going into the trades at a rate high enough to replace an older generation of retiring workers, creating a shortfall that will only deepen Canada’s cost of living crisis. Stigma around blue-collar work and concerns about workplace safety have discouraged younger generations from entering these professions.
The lack of qualified welders, plumbers, and electricians is not just an inconvenience: it stymies the development of housing, transportation, and energy infrastructure. In 2022, small Canadian firms lost $38 billion in business opportunities from labour shortages, with the construction sector shouldering most of the losses. Yet these trades, welding in particular, require precision, creativity, and skill. They are dangerous crafts that sit at the intersection of science and art.
My business partner Reza Abdollahi wanted to solve the issue of labourers having to perform dangerous welds and the related labour shortage when we founded our company, Novarc Technologies, in 2013. While I had a background in control system design and industrial automation, Reza had built his career in arc welding, automation, and robotics. Through consultations with industry experts, we created a robotic welding system, the world’s first collaborative welding robot, or “cobot”—the first of its kind in pipe welding applications. We called it the spool welding robot, or SWR.
Collaboration between cobots and humans is the key to making trades work faster, cleaner, and safer, without compromising quality or replacing the expertise of experienced and highly skilled welders. With them, employees can undertake more complicated tasks and, one day, will be expected to supervise the quality of the cobot’s work. For example, employees would supervise the quality of the alignment of metal pieces prior to a weld, referred to as a fit-up, which can determine the quality and strength of a weld.
One of our clients told us of a welder they employed who, over the span of their career, had completed many impressive welds but no longer had the hand dexterity to do the welds himself, so they had him supervise one of our robots. Integrating robots into the work environment is also beneficial for workers who aren’t limited by injury. Trades like welding come with many risks, from skin and eye exposure, to the welding arc—the bright, hot plasma able to generate the intense heat needed to weld two pieces of metal together. When you automate welding jobs, workers are less likely to come into contact with UV light, risk serious burns or inhale toxic fumes. Simultaneously, automating repetitive welds will give workers the time to hone their craft and focus on more complex, strategic and creative tasks.