Louisville's fastest-growing company has a new title attached to its name: One of the world's 10 most innovative robotics companies of 2022.
CRG Automation earned the recognition from Fast Company for its work with the U.S. Department of Defense to process and destroy the stockpile of 70,000 M55 rockets filled with VX and sarin nerve agents stored at Central Kentucky’s Blue Grass Army Depot in Richmond, Kentucky. The company designed a custom system that combined traditional industrial robots and newer autonomous robots to make the work safer and more efficient, and the project is expected to be completed by 2023.
“As a past member of the military, this project took on a special importance for me,” said CRG Automation President James DeSmet, in a news release. “The perplexing engineering problems to solve, the rapidly approaching deadline and the severity of the chemical agents involved all added up to a challenge we wanted to tackle.
"We’ve often talked here at CRG about how our engineers like the kind of problems that leave other R&D [research and development] teams scratching their heads or banging them against the wall. We knew this was an opportunity unlike any other, and, even staring down the pandemic, we knew we could do it.”
CRG Automation, formerly CRG Technologies, was Louisville's fastest-growing company in 2021 with 2,162% three-year revenue growth. Its revenue was $41 million in 2020, up from $1.8 million in 2018, according to Business First's Fast 50 list. CRG was also No. 171 on the national Inc. 5000 list last year.
In a previous interview, DeSmet told me the biggest challenge of the rocket project was figuring out how to build out the new process and systems within the existing plant infrastructure. It was like "greenfield design in a brownfield container."
"When we got down there, we worked the process backward," he explained. "They started at the end of the line, where they punch and drain the warhead to drain the chemicals out. Then we would take over from there and ultimately we designed a system to put it into a container, put a cap on the container, crimp it up, seal it and automatically convey it to the end the factory and out the door."
The automated system uses eight industrial robots and six autonomous mobile robots to process more than 25 warheads per hour.
Read more about the 10 most innovative robotics companies here.
