ATS Spotlight: SuperTrak 30th Anniversary​ 

Welcome to Enabling Automation. I’m your host, Ben Hope. I wanted to kick off the season

 with an educational story, one that I hope inspires the next generation of innovators and machine builders to never give up and to keep learning and growing. Today, I want to tell you the story of SuperTrak Conveyance on its 30th anniversary. A story of 30 years of learning, of building, of figuring things out along the way, and of making it better for the next application.

At the heart of every automation system is the way parts move through the machine, the conveyance system. Because no matter how advanced your tooling or robotics are, everything depends on how efficiently, accurately, and predictably you can move parts from one station to the next. And traditionally, that’s where the constraints are. If you wanted speed and precision, you used an indexing dial.

Everything moves together. Every station runs at the same cycle time, but your entire machine is limited by that slowest process. If you wanted flexibility, you used pallet or power and free conveyors. You could stop parts, control flow, route independently, but you paid for that flexibility. You lost speed, you lost precision, and often you need to locate tooling just to do any work at all.

So at the conveyance level, you had a fundamental trade off speed and precision or independent shuttle control. And as machines got more complex, that trade off became harder to live with. So the real question became, how do you build a conveyance system that gives you all three? That’s the problem SuperTrak was created to solve. And here’s the first lesson.

The biggest breakthroughs don’t come from optimizing inside the trade off. They come from refusing the trade off entirely. When the trade off starts limiting the whole system. That’s your signal. Change the architecture, not your outcome. By late 1996, that problem was clear we needed speed, precision, and independent control all at once. And that’s where linear motion technology came in.

It could be fast, it could be dynamic, it was precise, and it could be capable of providing this idea of independent shuttle control. Klaus Woerner, the founder of ATS, really drove the initiative. He assigned Ken Pelletier, a chief scientist, to lead the development. Ken worked with internal engineers and external companies to develop the technology across controls, electronics and mechanics.

Sadly though, Ken passed away during the development. Scott Lindsay, an electrical engineer with a mind for innovation, stepped in to continue the work, helping carry the system towards commercialization. But at that stage the system was still fragmented. Mechanics in one place, controls in another. Klaus made the call. Bring it all together. Because this wasn’t just a machine, it was a true mechatronic system.

The responsibility to build a team landed with Albert Kleinikkink. Albert was leading the controls team in standard products at the time, a group focused on introducing standardized technologies into machine design. He had a reputation for thinking beyond just controls, looking at how mechanics, motion, and electronics all needed to work together as one integrated system. That mindset became critical to SuperTrak. Over time

Albert would go on to become the director of R&D for SuperTrak, continuing to lead its innovation. But even in these early stages, he was helping define what the system needed to become. Working alongside him was Javan Taylor. Javan had started as a software development lead in the 1990s, focused on building standard controls platforms and making automation actually work in the real world.

He wasn’t just writing code, he was thinking about how engineers could use the system, how it could be made repeatable, and how complexity could be reduced. Over time he would take on a broader role across the track business, leading product management and overseeing applications, support and operations. But at this stage, his focus was clear make the system usable, reliable and scalable.

On the mechanical side, Don Mowat led the design. Don had been building automation systems at ATS since the mid 1980s. He brought decades of hands on experience into the design of SuperTrak, always grinding decisions and how the system would actually be used in a machine. He thought about how tooling would mount, how the system would be integrated, and how operators and engineers would interact with it in practice.

Don wasn’t designing in isolation, he was designing for real world performance, and that perspective shaped the mechanical foundation of the platform. In 2001, John Ditner joined the team. John was an experienced electrical engineer who had worked at other technology companies in the Waterloo Region before coming to ATS. He took on the redesign of the control system and electronics architecture, including the control boards, power systems and communication modules.

His work helped stabilize the system and made it scalable as it moved towards commercialization. John also brought a number of novel ideas to the platform how to manage things like the magnetic curves across gaps. How do you get shuttles on and off the system more easily. How to improve positional feedback. These weren’t small details. They were foundational to making the system robust and usable in real applications.

He also became a critical resource in the field, often helping troubleshoot and recover systems under pressure, bringing both technical depth and practical problem solving to the team, and I joined in 2002 as a product support specialist. Just as the system entered real applications. We realized something early. Not every station needs to run at the same cycle time. With independent shuttle control, you could start to balance the system. On slower stations you could work on more parts at once. 4 up. 6 up. Even 8 up. On faster stations, you could reduce how many parts you were working on and optimize the tooling and robotics. And what that meant was you could balance the entire system so that every station was producing most of the time. Another early learning was that shuttle transfer had to be fast all of the time.

Originally we had to stop the shuttle and rotate it. It worked, but it killed the performance. Albert came up with the rotating drum. Keep the shuttle moving. That one idea really unlocked the speed and massive opportunity and potential. Around the same time, Javan started working on something else. Because it wasn’t just the hardware that was complex, it was how you actually configured and ran the system.

At that stage, all of the configuration and settings had to be entered through a text file and then downloaded into the system. It took time, it took expertise, and it made the system harder to adopt. So Javan built the first version of TrakMaster. His goal was simple; make the system easier to use. TrakMaster provided a way to configure the system, define motion, and manage behavior without having to build everything from scratch.

It removed a huge amount of complexity and made the system more accessible, not just to controls experts, but to the broader engineering team. And that idea stuck. Today, TrakMaster evolved to simulation, diagnostics and configurability, but it’s still built on that original idea. The system shouldn’t just be powerful, it should also be usable. The first systems went out in 2002 into an automotive and a contact lens application, and honestly, it was tough.

Encoders were a major issue. We didn’t trust them and we knew if we didn’t fix it, the product wouldn’t survive. So we switched vendors for the encoder and it really changed everything. Stability and finally confidence. And we were learning in real time. At one point, Javan was on-site at an automotive plant doing a routine firmware update, and the system crashes, productions down.

 Plant manager is fuming. “You don’t leave until it’s running.” He called John Ditner. John Ditner helped him get into a boot mode recovery. Redownload the firmware. Back online. Phew. Big relief, big learning. This can’t happen again. We had another moment back at ATS in a basement lab that was in the back corner of the building with no windows. We called it the Dungeon. Javan in a developer named Aggrippa Katona were chasing intermittent faults. Accidentally, Javan touched a screwdriver to the shuttle and everything faulted immediately, and him and Aggrippa reacted. And they did it again and again, and it was repeatable. They decided to turn the lights off, which in the Dungeon made everything pitch black, and they could see when the screwdriver touched the shuttle, a spark. Static. A static charge was interfering with the positional feedback. The fix? An anti-static brush.

Simple once you see it, but it saved us some countless future issues. In automation the field is the truth. You can do everything right in the lab and still fail in production. The best systems are resilient, not just high performing. And another lesson: failures that feel mysterious usually aren’t. They’re just physics you haven’t seen yet. The key is curiosity.

In 2005, we released Generation 2 of SuperTrak, and this is where we really started to learn. Across industries it went into automotive, solar, packaging and pharma applications. We learned system limits, tooling, controls, thermal behavior. Independent shuttle control changed machine design. You could balance the system, run 1 up, 2 up, 4 up, optimize faster stations, build high performance systems and smaller ones too. Do more in less space. And we saw patterns and we built solutions into the system. Patterns become features, lessons become defaults. That’s platform thinking.

By 2014, Generation 3 represented a major leap forward, not just in performance but in confidence. This was the point where SuperTrak truly became a product platform that we believed could scale; inside ATS and across the broader automation industry. One of the biggest changes was architectural. We remove the rotating drum and introduced fully controlled linear motor curves. That meant the shuttle was no controlled across the entire system. Every millimeter, straight sections, curves, transitions, everything. And that had a huge impact. It reduced machine footprint dramatically. Stations can then be placed around curves, and because the motion was continuous and fully controlled, throughput and machine efficiency improved significantly.

Generation 3 was also substantially more powerful. Payload increased to ten kilograms. Acceleration capability increased by nearly five times compared to Generation 2, and the thermal characteristics improved dramatically because of the new aluminum profile design and its ability to dissipate heat much more effectively. That opened the door to far more aggressive applications, faster systems, heavier payloads, higher throughput, and much more demanding automation environments.

The mechanical system evolved significantly as well. The shuttle moved from a six wheel encapsulated design to a four wheel open design. That may sound small, but it changed the usability of the system dramatically. Shuttles can now be removed anywhere on the track. Maintenance became easier and the flexibility of the overall system increased significantly. Another major improvement involved shuttle repeatability and positioning accuracy.

The encoder system was moved to the top of the shuttle, which reduced tolerance stack up effects, and improved repeatability substantially. But one of the biggest evolutions was in controls and software, and a huge part of that came from Graham Knap. Graham was a software developer who played a major role in driving Generation 3 forward. One of Graham’s most important contributions was centralizing the control architecture onto a single industrial PC.

That change had a massive impact. It increased system capability. It enabled larger systems. It enabled more advanced software functionality, higher throughput, higher precision, and it made the platform significantly easier to use and expand. It also allowed SuperTrak to support multiple industrial networks and field bus interfaces, including Ethercat, Ethernet IP, Profinet, and Power Link, and that was critical because machine builders all have different standards, different PLCs, different ecosystems, different customer requirements.

Generation 3 was designed to integrate into all of them. That flexibility helped move SuperTrak from a specialized technology to a true industrial product platform. This was also the generation where the software really matured. The system became easier to configure, more diagnosable, more capable. Capabilities that previously had to be custom programed started becoming standardized system functions. Collision avoidance, position triggers, predictable recovery, advanced motion control. Instead of reinventing these capabilities on every machine, they were now built into the platform itself. And that’s where learning from previous generations really compounded. But there was another part of Generation 3 that proved just as important. And it’s something that often gets overlooked in automation: product support, because building great technology is one thing, but helping customers successfully adopt it, that’s something else entirely.

And one person who deserves a tremendous amount of credit in that area is Jan Bolhuis. Jan played a critical role in helping launch Generation 3, supporting customers, solving problems in the field and helping machine builders gain confidence in the technology. Because at the end of the day, a product only succeeds if customers succeed with it, and that process of supporting real applications becomes incredibly valuable because it’s how you learn, it’s how you understand what customers actually need. It’s how you uncover limitations, identify opportunities, and continue improving the product generation after generation. And today, Jan has taken those lessons learned over years in the field and applies them to helping customers successfully utilize SuperTrak every day. SuperTrak was no longer just an interesting concept. It was fast, precise, flexible, scalable, industrialized, and finally ready to become a true global product.

We brought Generation 3 to market through partners like Bosch Rexroth, who branded it as Active Mover, and through BNR, who branded it as SuperTrak. And this is really where SuperTrak truly became an automation platform. And another lesson. At some point, every technology reaches a transition from prototype to platform, and the transition doesn’t happen because of one breakthrough.

It happens because hundreds of lessons finally start working together. Mechanical design, software, controls, thermal management, usability, integration. That’s when a technology becomes scalable, and that’s when industries start trusting it. This didn’t happen all at once. Years of building, failing, learning. And over time, those lessons got built into the system. Not just a faster way to move parts, but a better way to build machines. Built by machine builders for machine builders.

Happy 30th birthday to SuperTrak Conveyance, and thank you to all the people who have contributed to its technology and its success. Today Albert Kleinikkink leads SuperTrak R&D,

 continuing to push innovation forward. Javan Taylor is a staff specialist, mentoring the next generation and working closely with customers. John Ditner, Don Mowat and Scott Lindsay have all retired, leaving their legacy in the technology itself. And I’ve had the privilege of being part of this journey as Director of Product Commercialization.

This group and many others helped build something truly impactful and helped

reshape the automation industry. I hope this story resonates with those out there who are working hard to bring the next impactful technology to life. Not only do we celebrate SuperTrak, but we celebrate the people behind the platform and those around the world advancing automation every day.

If you’re new to the field, take these lessons and apply them to what you’re building. Thank you to all our listeners for joining us on Enabling Automation. If today’s story sparked ideas or questions, we’d love to hear from you. Be sure to subscribe to stay up to date with future episodes where we explore more breakthroughs shaping the automation world. Until next time, keep innovating, stay curious, and thanks for tuning in.