Having recently celebrated his company’s tenth anniversary, Shahram Tafazoli, founder and president of Motion Metrics International Corp., couldn’t have asked for a better birthday present. On August 12, 2009, the federal Minister of National Revenue, Jean-Pierre Blackburn, presented Tafazoli with a cheque for $931,000 in Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SR&ED;) tax credits. This amount represents 35 to 40 cents of every dollar spent by the company on R&D; over the preceding two years.
Motion Metrics, housed in the ICICS building, develops intelligent embedded systems for the open-pit mining industry. Their main product, ToothMetrics, is a camera-based system for detecting missing teeth in mining shovels. A broken tooth that goes undetected may end up jamming and seriously damaging the mine’s crusher, often a $1M problem. Freeing a broken tooth from a jammed crusher is also highly dangerous work—mining personnel have been killed trying to do it.
The company’s other products include ViewMetrics, a camera-based vision system for mining shovels; ViewMetrics-Radar, which adds proximity detection to the camera views; and FragMetrics, which uses computer vision to analyze rock fragments in the shovel.
Motion Metrics emerged from Tafazoli’s PhD work at UBC in the 1990s, co-supervised by ICICS members Peter Lawrence (ECE) and Clarence de Silva (MECH). At the time, Lawrence and a team of ICICS researchers were working on simplifying the operator controls on heavy equipment such as excavators, log loaders, grapple yarders, and feller-bunchers. Tafazoli, now an ICICS member himself and ECE adjunct professor, contributed to this work by modelling the dynamics and frictional effects of hydraulic excavators. After completing his PhD in 1997, he started a consulting company with his two first clients, Lawrence and Tim Salcudean (ICICS/ECE), and initial free space from ICICS. Several years later, LoadMetrics, a bucket payload detection system for hydraulic mining shovels based on Tafazoli’s PhD work, was on the market. He then went on to develop ToothMetrics, based on perceived market need, and his company took off.
Tafazoli and his 15 employees, many of whom are former students of ICICS members, are constantly developing novel customer-driven products. Their emphasis on R&D;, supported by programs such as SR&ED; and driven by the culture of innovation at ICICS, is a clear formula for success.