2011 to today, project by project.
Epcotec started in Edmonton, Alberta in 2011 with one method and one conviction: measurement-grade survey fused with software, delivered by senior engineers. Fifteen years later the record runs from steel plants in Hamilton to the Great Barrier Reef, from defence estates to national clinical registries. The company got here as a team: the founder had the initiative, and the practice areas, technologies and growth belong to the four leads and the people around them.
The founding year
Epcotec starts in Edmonton. The founding HFTRS method (lidar and photogrammetry fused in one pass, sub-5-millimetre point accuracy) goes straight to work on civil, transportation and municipal infrastructure surveys, including remote-sensing investigations in the Rocky Mountains parks.
First municipal corridor survey, Edmonton
Client & task
City of Edmonton arterial network, resurveyed ahead of a capital works programme.
Prove the fused HFTRS acquisition at full city scale: lidar and photogrammetry in one pass, deliverable accepted per 100 m segment with positional accuracy certificates.
Complexities we solved
- Photogrammetry failed over low-texture fresh asphalt: the lidar range channel anchored the solution where image matching collapsed.
- Acceptance was written per segment, not per dataset, so the pipeline had to certify accuracy continuously rather than at the end.
Result
Sub-5-millimetre certified point accuracy across the arterial network; the method became the studio standard on day one.
Transportation asset condition baseline
Client & task
An Alberta transportation contractor with no digital condition record for its maintained roads.
Fuse IRI and rutting profiles with located imagery into a per-segment condition baseline ready for maintenance planning.
Complexities we solved
- Condition data arrived in referencing dialects that never matched the network: a normaliser with an exception queue was built before any analytics ran.
Result
A defensible condition baseline adopted for the maintenance planning cycle.
Rocky Mountains parks investigations (Jasper and Banff)
Client & task
National parks and reserves where ground crews are constrained and terrain is unforgiving.
Terrestrial remote-sensing investigations of access corridors, terrain hazards and infrastructure footprints inside Jasper and Banff national parks.
Complexities we solved
- Dense canopy defeated photogrammetric ground capture: lidar ground returns carried the terrain model.
- Field windows were bounded by wildlife and visitor seasons: acquisition was planned to ecological calendars, not just weather.
Result
Hazard and corridor registers delivered without a single off-season intrusion.
ALSO DELIVERED IN THIS ERA: Utility as-builts, drainage studies, small cadastral jobs and the first subcontracts that kept the bench full.
Proving the method at network scale
The second year turned a clever one-pass method into a production system able to hold network-scale programmes.
Provincial highway HFTRS programme
Client & task
Provincial highway corridors requiring repeatable, chainage-locked survey products.
Deliver fused lidar-photogrammetry products locked to chainage for multiple provincial highways, with acceptance criteria per segment.
Complexities we solved
- Curve radius and cant broke naive centrelines: per-chord fitting with cant compensation replaced global splines.
Result
Chainage-locked corridor layers adopted as the provincial reference for the programme.
Municipal infrastructure baselines
Client & task
Satellite towns around Edmonton standing up their first digital infrastructure records.
Roads, drainage and public-asset baselines extracted from one HFTRS epoch per town.
Complexities we solved
- Each town kept records in its own convention: extraction contracts were written per town against one fused base.
Result
Baselines delivered per town from a single acquisition, at a fraction of separate-survey cost.
Drainage and hydrology studies from lidar DEMs
Client & task
Engineering consultants needing catchment and flow-path inputs for drainage design.
Breakline-enforced DEM production and flow-path analytics from fused corridor data.
Complexities we solved
- Raw DEMs misled flow paths across culverts: culvert structures were enforced as breaklines from the imagery channel.
Result
Drainage studies accepted without a single re-survey request.
ALSO DELIVERED IN THIS ERA: Reserve-road programmes, gravel-road condition work and the first aerial photography campaigns.
Industrial asset management in steel country
The business expands to Hamilton, Ontario, into asset management on industrial sites at the heart of Canadian steel: Stelco and ArcelorMittal Dofasco. Operating plants set the terms: measurement around production, not through it.
Steel plant asset investigation (Stelco)
Client & task
An operating Stelco plant where investigations had to run around production schedules.
HFTRS acquisition inside the plant: cranes, rail spurs, buildings and process infrastructure measured, classified and reported for the upgrade programme.
Complexities we solved
- Dust and heat degraded optical returns: acquisition windows and sensor settings were tuned per bay.
- Access was negotiated shift by shift: the plan was built around the production calendar, not the survey plan.
Result
Asset investigation reporting that fed the plant upgrade programme directly.
Site infrastructure reporting and upgrades (ArcelorMittal Dofasco)
Client & task
ArcelorMittal Dofasco, Hamilton’s largest private employer, requiring infrastructure investigation reporting ahead of upgrade works.
Investigation reporting and upgrade surveys across site infrastructure: rails, building frames, services and drainage.
Complexities we solved
- Electromagnetic environment around operating cranes disturbed some sensors: measurement plans were re-sequenced around EMI sources.
- Every finding had to be located on drawings from multiple decades: registration to as-built geometry preceded defect mapping.
Result
Upgrade works prioritised on measured evidence instead of anecdote.
Industrial asset management baseline
Client & task
Industrial sites with asset records spread across drawings, spreadsheets and memory.
One asset registry with location and condition per record, built from fused acquisition and reconciled against plant drawings.
Complexities we solved
- Drawings from four decades disagreed: registration to as-built geometry came first, then reconciliation.
Result
Registries accepted by plant engineering as the single reference.
ALSO DELIVERED IN THIS ERA: Rail spurs, roof condition surveys, structural assessments and shutdown-window measurement campaigns.
Councils and highways
Expansion into the Greater Toronto Area: highway corridors and a run of councils including Mississauga, Toronto, Oakville, Brampton and Oshawa. Two threads define the era: terrestrial remote sensing at corridor scale, and microsimulation modelling that turned data into funding decisions.
Highway 401 corridor programme
Client & task
One of North America’s busiest highways, surveyed under live traffic.
HFTRS corridor products under live traffic: geometry, structures and furniture locked to chainage for design and asset teams.
Complexities we solved
- Median and shoulder acquisition windows were minutes long: swarm sorties were timed to traffic gaps and validated on exit.
Result
Chainage-locked corridor layers accepted for design without lane closures.
Highways 406 and 407 programmes
Client & task
Provincial corridors with managed lanes and tolled geometry.
Corridor and structure surveys supporting ETL geometry and asset programmes on the 406 and 407.
Complexities we solved
- Toll-lane geometry demanded tighter tolerances: acceptance thresholds were tightened per element class.
Result
Design-ready corridor products delivered into the provincial programmes.
Microsimulation modelling for councils
Client & task
Councils including Mississauga, Toronto, Oakville, Brampton and Oshawa needing evidence for signal retiming and upgrades.
Microsimulation models fed by fused detector, count and geometry data, with before-and-after evaluation that survives council scrutiny.
Complexities we solved
- Detector health varied silently across vendors: per-detector health scoring excluded unreliable inputs with a visible methodology note.
Result
Retiming and upgrade cases approved on measured delay reductions.
Council road-network condition programmes
Client & task
GTA councils rolling condition programmes into asset plans.
Network condition baselines per council from fused mobile-mapping and imagery passes.
Complexities we solved
- Each council owned a different network reference: per-council referencing contracts normalised the data at ingestion.
Result
Comparable condition baselines across five councils from consistent methodology.
ALSO DELIVERED IN THIS ERA: Intersection redesigns, cycle-track geometry, tender quality-control packs.
Defence
In September 2015 the business streams to Australia. The first South Australian projects are defence-related: acquisition and geospatial products inside security-controlled estates.
Defence-estate geospatial programmes
Client & task
Security-controlled defence estates in South Australia.
HFTRS acquisition and geospatial products inside escort and clearance regimes, delivered to defence documentation standards.
Complexities we solved
- Access was escorted and windows short: plans were rehearsed against security constraints before mobilisation.
- Products could not leave the estate in raw form: delivery pipelines were built to publish curated products only.
Result
Products accepted inside the security regime; the programme extended into subsequent years.
Range infrastructure condition and clearance
Client & task
Range and training infrastructure with clearance-critical geometry.
Condition and clearance surveys feeding range maintenance and certification.
Complexities we solved
- Clearance criteria were stricter than civil practice: thresholds were lifted to defence tolerances per element class.
Result
Certification evidence delivered on the defence documentation template.
Spectral signature trials
Client & task
Defence contexts expanding the studio spectral library beyond civilian materials.
Capture and characterisation trials growing the reflectance library for defence-relevant material classes.
Complexities we solved
- Target materials were defined by class, not sample: library entries were built per class with uncertainty bands.
Result
Library expansion that later carried the multi-spectral detection practice.
ALSO DELIVERED IN THIS ERA: Secure delivery pipelines and the first Australian entity paperwork.
Councils and Victorian transport
Melbourne and Victoria: multiple councils and the Victorian transportation programmes, with the fused-acquisition method now applied to footpaths, kerbs, canopy and corridor alike.
Victorian transportation data programmes
Client & task
Victorian transport programmes needing consistent corridor and network data.
Corridor and network data delivery against Victorian specifications.
Complexities we solved
- Specification dialects differ from the Canadian practice the team grew up in: acceptance criteria were mapped line by line before mobilisation.
Result
Deliveries accepted against Victorian specifications at first pass.
Council condition programmes, greater Melbourne
Client & task
Councils needing road, footpath and kerb condition under budget scrutiny.
Condition baselines and defect registers ready for asset-plan sign-off.
Complexities we solved
- Footpath and kerb assets are small, numerous and裁判-sensitive: extraction contracts specified tolerance per asset class.
Result
Asset plans signed off on measured baselines.
Canopy and vegetation spectral mapping
Client & task
Councils managing canopy targets and species compliance.
Species and canopy mapping from the studio spectral library.
Complexities we solved
- Species with near-identical visual signatures separated only in UV bands: lab library codes made them separable from the air.
Result
Canopy and species layers adopted into council planning.
ALSO DELIVERED IN THIS ERA: Drainage condition, playground and furniture inventories.
Hume Highway and the coastal councils
Expansion to Canberra and Sydney, purely around the Hume Highway and municipal infrastructure, including the small cities of Bowral, Berrima, Shellharbour, Kiama and Wollongong.
Hume Highway programme
Client & task
The Hume Highway corridor between Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne.
Corridor HFTRS products and structure surveys feeding maintenance and upgrade programmes.
Complexities we solved
- Corridor length made epoch consistency critical: acquisition was staged to keep the product on one reference frame.
Result
One reference frame across the programme; maintenance teams planning from measured data.
Southern Highlands council infrastructure (Bowral, Berrima)
Client & task
Southern Highlands councils with heritage-sensitive streetscapes.
Roads, drainage and public-asset inventories with heritage-conscious extraction.
Complexities we solved
- Heritage streetscapes punish heavy equipment: acquisition was planned to protect streetscape fabric.
Result
Inventories delivered without a single streetscape complaint.
Illawarra coastal councils (Shellharbour, Kiama, Wollongong)
Client & task
Coastal councils with roads, drainage and salt-exposed assets.
Condition programmes across roads, drainage and coastal structures.
Complexities we solved
- Salt exposure changes defect signatures: condition grading accounted for coastal corrosion classes.
Result
Coastal asset registers feeding works planning across all three councils.
ALSO DELIVERED IN THIS ERA: Canberra drainage studies, crown-land investigations and flood-passage reviews.
Heavy infrastructure, forensics and the farm gate
The far west of New South Wales: wastewater treatment plants, roads, hydrology and hydraulics, terrestrial remote sensing, asset management and control, farming, expert witnessing and forensic investigations. Civil, structural and municipal engineering now collaborate with laser technologies, photogrammetry and forensics as one practice.
Wastewater treatment plant programmes
Client & task
Far-west NSW treatment plants with paper records and ageing process equipment.
Structural condition, process telemetry and asset registers for treatment plant upgrades.
Complexities we solved
- Paper instrument records carried transcription errors: double-entry digitisation with continuity checks preceded any analytics.
Result
Upgrade programmes scoped on measured evidence.
Flood-resilient far-west road networks
Client & task
Road networks that flood, cut communities off and burn maintenance budgets.
Hydrology and hydraulics studies fused from lidar terrain, with resilience ranking per segment.
Complexities we solved
- Flat terrain makes flow paths ambiguous: culvert and grade enforcement from imagery preceded flow modelling.
Result
Resilience-ranked works programmes accepted by council and state funders.
Farming and water investigations
Client & task
Farm enterprises needing storage, irrigation and land-form evidence.
On-farm storage volumes, irrigation layouts and land-form surveys from fused acquisition.
Complexities we solved
- Property boundaries and water entitlements interlocked: surveys were tied to entitlement maps to keep the numbers defensible.
Result
Investment decisions taken on measured storage and layout data.
Forensic and expert-witness investigations
Client & task
Disputes and insurance matters requiring measurement-grade evidence.
Forensic measurement investigations with an evidence chain that holds in proceedings.
Complexities we solved
- Evidentiary standards exceed engineering standards: chain-of-custody, instrument calibration and repeatability were documented end to end.
Result
Reports accepted in proceedings without measurement challenges.
ALSO DELIVERED IN THIS ERA: Culvert inventories, asset-control system rollouts, stock-route investigations.
The Nature-published principle, and the reef
A discharge-guidance principle is published in the Nature portfolio in 2020 (work linked to ANU: electrical discharges guided by optically trapped graphene microparticles, cutting the discharge threshold by about 30%). Within the studio it is treated not as a personal achievement but as part of the workflow: science engagement feeding directly into the linear optics R&D practice. The business expands to Queensland, from Gold Coast roads and highways to remote councils, Cairns and the far north: detailed plant and animal population surveys, and iconic Great Barrier Reef scanning through airborne equipment.
Queensland council and highway programmes
Client & task
Councils from the Gold Coast to remote far-north Queensland.
Roads and highways infrastructure surveys and condition programmes across dispersed councils.
Complexities we solved
- Distances made mobilisation the cost driver: acquisition sorties were multi-council by design, with per-council deliverables split in post-processing.
Result
Programme economics that made remote-council surveys affordable.
Far-north forest population surveys
Client & task
Far-north region forests needing plant species, density and animal population evidence.
Multispectral swarm surveys mapped plant species and density; acoustic and thermal passes supported animal population evidence.
Complexities we solved
- Canopy closure hid ground layers: lidar vertical profiles carried understorey structure where imagery could not.
- Species libraries for far-north flora were thin: lab capture runs built the missing codes.
Result
Population and density evidence accepted by environmental reviewers.
Great Barrier Reef airborne scanning
Client & task
Iconic reef programmes requiring non-contact data collection over protected marine structures.
Airborne reef scanning and data collection: structure extents, shallows and changes captured without touching the reef.
Complexities we solved
- Permits and reef protection rules bound every pass: flight and sensor plans were approved before a single sortie.
- Water clarity governed band choice: passes were keyed to measured clarity windows.
Result
Reef structure datasets delivered under full environmental compliance.
Linear optics R&D lab stood up
Client & task
The published principle needed a practice, not just a paper.
Stand up the linear optics R&D lab: the beamline, the particle-replenishment design, characterisation harnesses and the safety regime.
Complexities we solved
- A published principle is not a product: the lab industrialised repetition and measurement before any application work.
Result
The R&D practice that now feeds applied engagements, from feasibility to TRL-raise.
ALSO DELIVERED IN THIS ERA: Environmental compliance programmes, reef-partner data pipelines, the first optically-guided discharge client trials.
COVID, and the defence years
COVID cuts delivery volume to ten or fifteen projects a year, and the team rebuilds delivery for remote work. In 2021, the studio’s remote-sensing technologies are provisioned to the defence complex in Ukraine.
Remote telemetry commissioning
Client & task
A client commissioning sensor infrastructure while field crews were grounded.
Telemetry commissioning performed fully remotely: site gateways configured through local partners against remote test rigs.
Complexities we solved
- No boots on site meant no manual retries: commissioning scripts had to be idempotent and self-verifying.
Result
Sites commissioned remotely with documented equivalence to on-site practice.
Cloud migration for a stranded on-premise platform
Client & task
A client whose on-premise platform could not be visited or scaled.
Full migration to cloud with minimal on-site dependency.
Complexities we solved
- Years of undocumented configuration: automated discovery and characterisation preceded any move.
Result
Platform migrated during restrictions with zero data loss.
Multi-spectral detection provisioned for Ukraine
Client & task
The defence complex in Ukraine, under operational timelines.
HFTRS-derived multi-spectral detection provisioned for reconnaissance: signature libraries for materiel, equipment and personnel classes, fused passes holding detection through visual camouflage.
Complexities we solved
- Camouflage engineered against visual and thermal bands: signatures outside those bands carried the detection.
- Reporting timelines were measured in hours: the pipeline delivered georeferenced products on the same clock it was validated on.
Result
Detection held through masking across delivered passes; the pipeline ran on operational timelines.
ALSO DELIVERED IN THIS ERA: Remote AI tooling adoption inside the studio: the pivot that defined the next era.
The AI and software engineering pivot
The practice consciously pivots to where the demand is: AI platforms, product engineering, cloud rescue, data and MLOps, security, integration and voice. The delivery governance built over a decade (fixed scope, weekly demos, staging from week one) now ships software.
Grounded assistant inside a government boundary
Client & task
A government agency with 40,000+ documents and PROTECTED-level expectations.
An on-tenancy RAG assistant with citation-grade answers and permission inheritance.
Complexities we solved
- Answers had to inherit document permissions.
- Answer-quality degradation after model changes was unmeasurable.
Result
P95 latency 2.1 s, groundedness 0.94, zero data-egress findings, evaluation gate in CI.
Payments platform made boring to deploy
Client & task
A payments platform with recurring incidents and a climbing cloud bill.
Declarative, auditable, reversible deploys and a credible cost plan.
Complexities we solved
- Releases were hand-assembled.
- Incidents surfaced only when customers noticed.
Result
GitOps with health-gated rollback; MTTR from four hours to 22 minutes; 34% run-rate reduction from the companion audit.
National clinical registry, modernised
Client & task
A university-led national clinical registry programme.
Entry, validation, reporting and multi-clinic access modernised.
Complexities we solved
- Legacy data quality was unknown until reconciled.
- Access rules differ per clinic, role and study.
Result
Migration signed off line by line; 14 clinics onboarded in the first wave.
Voice platform across North America
Client & task
Hospitality and professional-services clients in the United States and Canada.
The full phone system, run for them, with an optional AI receptionist layer.
Complexities we solved
- Carrier-grade telephony leaves no room for demo-grade engineering: numbers, SIP, IVR, queues, recording and porting were all delivered to carrier standards.
Result
A repeatable voice product line across the United States and Canada.
ALSO DELIVERED IN THIS ERA: CIAM, GRC evidence systems, document intelligence at 2.4M pages, market-data pipelines, evaluation harnesses, team extensions.
About a hundred a year
Delivery volume is now about a hundred engagements per year, across two entities and every practice area. The tender engine answers RFPs within two business days, and the linear optics R&D group continues industrialising the published principle.
AI platform deliveries at volume
Client & task
Enterprise and government clients adopting AI under compliance pressure.
Grounded assistants, agent platforms and evaluation gates delivered as a repeatable product line.
Complexities we solved
- Volume multiplies edge cases: the evaluation harness generalised so new clients inherit tested defaults.
Result
AI delivery became a product line rather than a project-by-project invention.
Integration and modernisation at fleet scale
Client & task
Owners replacing records, ERP overlays and legacy viewers across portfolios.
Strangler-pattern modernisations and integration layers delivered in parallel across clients.
Complexities we solved
- Parallel programmes share nothing at first glance: shared patterns (characterisation tests, reconciliation gates) made them repeatable.
Result
Modernisations delivered with no freeze windows across the portfolio.
Linear optics industrialisation continues
Client & task
The published principle moving from bench to application.
Continue industrialisation of the guided-discharge principle across deposition, sterilisation and static-dissipation applications.
Complexities we solved
- Each application owns its own regime: characterisation came first, application second, every time.
Result
A working R&D-to-engineering handover model other studios study.
ALSO DELIVERED IN THIS ERA: Voice rollouts, tender-response delivery in two business days, and the next cohort of graduate engineers.
The next era is being delivered now.
About a hundred engagements a year, across two entities and every practice area. Yours can be in the next update of this page.
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