Robotics company in Greenville expands market

by Judy Waggoner, for Fox Valley Inc.
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Thomas Doyle has taken QComp Technologies Inc., a company he started 15 years ago, from a 300-square-foot rented space to its own 27,000-square-foot building in a Greenville industrial park.

An electrical engineer, Doyle took the experience he got working five years at General Electric and launched QComp to provide drive and control systems for local manufacturing companies.

“I enjoy projects; they have a start and a finish, and technology. It’s challenging,” he said.

QComp’s business is almost equally divided between two divisions — drives and controls, and robotics and automation. Doyle started the robotics division seven years ago.

“We saw a definite trend in the field of robotics,” he said.

While the use of robots in manufacturing began several decades ago, a wave of popularity flourished in the 1980s. Unfortunately, reliability, software and performance issues caused robotics to be oversold and over promised, Doyle explained.

“In the mid-1990s there was a resurgence in robotics because reliability, software and performance were improved,” he said. “In the last five years, technology has really come a long way,” Doyle said.

QComp’s robotics division is focused on two industrial segments — architectural glass and material handling for consumer products.

Leading the way in global robotic technology is ABB Group, a European conglomerate based in Switzerland. QComp became a licensed ABB integrator in 1998.

Taking a bold step, QComp has recently introduced a new product line of automated guided vehicles (AGVs).

“It took a little over a year to develop the AGV; we were sold on the concept but had to decide if the market was there,” Doyle said.

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