Ray Boehm is something of a legend at Rayhawk Technologies, the railcar-loading automation startup that bears his name. It’s not just that he’s the father of founder Tom Boehm, or that he occasionally shows up to the Saskatoon-based facility dressed head-to-toe in Rayhawk gear. It’s that his life story has become a part of the unofficial lore underpinning the company’s founding and mission.
As marketing manager Kayleigh Feschuk tells it, it was Ray’s experiences loading and unloading railcars in rural Saskatchewan, and the worry it caused Tom and his mother, that helped inspire Tom and the team at Rayhawk to automate the dangerous job and take human risk out of the equation altogether.
“It was something Ray and his wife frequently talked about; when it was time to get up on top of those railcars, during those bitterly cold loading days in rural Saskatchewan where the wind and the snow blow, it was something Tom grew up knowing his mother was worried about—and that he had a quiet worry about, too,” Feschuk said.
“[Tom] began to see that there was not only a need, but a really clear-cut place where automation could take people off of railcars.”
Tom didn’t follow his father up onto those railcars. Instead, he earned a diploma in electrical engineering from the Saskatchewan Institute of Applied Science and Technology (now Saskatchewan Polytechnic). He went on to found Team Power Solutions (TPS), an engineering and automation company. It was at TPS, when the company began working with a grain elevator, that Tom came to realize that while the rail industry had advanced, railcar loading had changed little since his father’s working days.
“The current procedure for opening and closing railcars…is to harness a human being in and they will walk on the railcars to open and close them,” Feshcuk said, adding that many of the falls that occur at grain elevators do so during this part of the loading operation. “[Tom] began to see that there was not only a need, but a really clear-cut place where automation could take people off of railcars.”
That spark of inspiration turned into years of development and prototyping at TPS. Those efforts eventually yielded a mechanical gantry system that operates on X, Y, and Z axes to autonomously open and close the lids of a railcar as it passes through a grain elevator or other loading facility.
There was more to it than just figuring out the mechanics of performing the task quickly and autonomously. The team needed to consider the myriad of conditions under which its system might operate. That’s where machine learning and computer vision came in, training the system to differentiate between latch types, visibility, changing lighting conditions, precipitation, and extreme weather.
“Once [the system] is exposed, it can learn how to overcome a condition, to detect [a latch] despite an issue, and even choose the amount of force used on the lid,” Feschuk said.
Throughout that period of research and development, Tom and the folks at TPS concluded that rather than operate this unique service as a part of TPS, the technology warranted a standalone entity.
“They began to realize there was really a separate venture here,” Feschuk said.
The independent Rayhawk was officially born in 2021; since then, the startup has grown by leaps and bounds. Last year, the company secured $3 million CAD in seed funding led by Emmertech, which Rayhawk used to commercialize its technology and scale operations. The company is focusing on grain elevators as its primary objective, but said it plans to grow and expand as it’s exposed to different lid and load types.
Currently, the system can be deployed on a variety of freight types, from grain to mined materials. However, the gantry system doesn’t have a use case on liquid freight, according to Feschuk.
“Our primary objective is to be working with grain elevators because that’s how we’ve been optimizing the system thus far,” she said. “Over time, that’s going to grow and expand.”
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Rayhawk has also received support through government programming from Innovation Saskatchewan, PrairiesCan, and the National Research Council of Canada’s Industrial Research Assistance Program, though Rayhawk did not disclose the dollar amounts of those investments.
Most recently, the company announced it had secured three US contracts: one in Illinois with FS Grain, another with Market County Grain in Minnesota, and a third with Dakota Midland Grain in North Dakota.
Those contracts are a significant milestone for Rayhawk, marking its first deployments into the US market. Both of the company’s deployed systems are currently in the Saskatoon area. Feschuk said the company hopes to expand into other regions of Canada, but interest from the US developed organically first.
“When it came to the actual knock on the door, it came from south of the border, which is interesting because the markets don’t look different, but they very much act differently,” Feschuk said. “In this case, to see such motivation coming from the US, which is a substantially larger market, was really appealing.”
All images courtesy Rayhawk Technologies.