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The Royal Society of Canada (RSC) and its Members have elected this year’s new Fellows and named the incoming class of the RSC College.

One hundred and one new Fellows have been elected by their peers for their outstanding scholarly, scientific and artistic achievement. Recognition by the RSC for career achievement is the highest honour an individual can achieve in the Arts, Social Sciences and Sciences. One of those newly elected Fellows is electrical and computer engineering professor, Kerstin Dautenhahn.

North America has 10 million kilometres of overhead power lines, and when vegetation come into contact with one, it can be like tinder to a flame.

“Once they come in contact with trees, the risk of forest fires increases,” says Anson Maitland (PhD ’19), co-founder of Enerza, a company at Velocity, University of Waterloo’s startup incubator. “With our robot, utilities can spot vegetation risks, corrosion or birds' nests near the line and send out a team to handle it.”

He says that much of North America’s power infrastructure was built in the 1960’s or 70’s. Power lines are often found in rural, forested areas and only monitored on average once every five years. While aware of the problem and eager for a solution, utilities companies don’t know where to best spend their operating dollars.

And without better monitoring tools, it’s difficult to know where and when to do maintenance.

“How would they know which ones to maintain or replace?” says Maitland. “With the robot they can inspect infrastructure more frequently and know with confidence when and where to replace power lines or trim trees.”

Enerza co-founder James Aein says the company’s tech is not just a robot but also a grid analytics platform. Just like a health care provider uses medical imaging to investigate patients’ health before invasive procedures, it gives utilities a whole picture of risks and maintenance needs.

Manmeet Maggu remembers being a fourth-year University of Waterloo student when his nephew, Praneit, was diagnosed with cerebral palsy. With an illness that affects muscle tone, movement and motor skills, Maggu’s family braced for the reality that Praneit would never take his first steps.

Studying to become an engineer at the time, Maggu and classmate Rahul Udasi (BASc ’14) began searching for solutions. After no suitable options appeared, the pair put their mechatronic skills to work, applying what they had learned at Waterloo to address a global problem.

Smart cities are moving towards the automation of many essential services. Quality of life for city residents relies on the safety of its buildings, roads, bridges and other infrastructures. Manual inspection of these infrastructures, besides being costly, is a tedious task that requires special skills and intense labour — especially when access to some sites, like bridges, is not easy. Due to the sheer number of bridges and inspection timelines, there is a critical backlog for inspecting bridges in Canada that requires an immediate solution.

Autonomous airline Ribbit has signed a $1.3 million contract with Transport Canada to start testing its commercial cargo aircraft to deliver goods to northern Canada, starting in 2024. 

“Ribbit ultimately exists to help improve access to transportation,” Jeremy Wang, co-founder and COO, said. "Our dream would be a future where anybody can receive goods quickly and reliably no matter where they are located.” 

Wang said the company’s initial goal is to serve northern Canada, where about 120 million pounds of food gets delivered annually. 

“These are northern, isolated communities where all cargo gets flown in by air and the cost of food and rates of food insecurity are very high,” Wang said. 

How would the treatment experience and outcomes change for cancer patients if we could actively deliver chemotherapy drugs directly to their tumours?

What if large and complex kidney stones could be dissolved without the need for invasive procedures?

Earlier this year, the Narwhal Project released their annual Narwhal List, which tracks Canadian technology companies that are on their way to unicorn status based on their billion-dollar annual revenues.    

The Narwhal Project has evaluated more than 900 Canadian technology companies that have received more than $10 million dollars of capital. Recognizing four Waterloo companies — ApplyBoard, Avidbots Corp, Auvik Networks and eSentire — as some of the fastest-growing Canadian technology companies.

Last weekend, University of Waterloo students on a multi-school autonomous racing team achieved a personal best speed of 173.8 kph at a race on the Monza F1 Circuit in Milan, Italy.

The race, which featured five teams with members from universities around the world, was the Waterloo students’ fifth race, and the first on a road course rather than a banked oval track.

Cobionix, a robotics company, has raised a $2.8 million seed round to launch Codi, an industry-first tele-robotic medical imaging system. As part of the University of Waterloo’s Velocity incubator, Cobionix aims to increase diagnostic imaging access and lower healthcare costs by reducing procedure time, ultimately benefiting patient care.

Engineers at the University of Waterloo have discovered a new way to program robots to help people with dementia locate medicine, glasses, phones and other objects they need but have lost.

And while the initial focus is on assisting a specific group of people, the technology could someday be used by anyone who has searched high and low for something they’ve misplaced.