ICOR Technology

ICOR Technology builds remotely operated robots for bomb disposal and tactical police work, and it does so from a single site in Ottawa. The company was incorporated in 2005 and manufactures inside a 27,500 square foot facility located close to Canada's Department of National Defence and the RCMP headquarters, which is not a coincidence. Design, research, production and quality assurance all happen in that building, and ICOR makes a point of the fact that its robots are not assembled from outsourced subsystems.

The CALIBER line is the whole business. It runs across five platform sizes so that an agency can standardise on one control philosophy across very different tasks. The CALIBER MK4 is the current large EOD platform. The MK3 CALIBER remains in the range below it. The CALIBER T5 and CALIBER FLEX cover mid-weight and configurable roles, and the Mini-CALIBER is the small tactical robot, light enough for a two-person team to deploy and the model that the National Tactical Officers Association has tested and recommended. ICOR robots have also been through third party testing by NIST and the US Department of Homeland Security, which matters in a market where procurement officers rarely get to run their own trials.

Around the robots sits a set of tools that make the platforms useful once they arrive at a device. That includes EOD and IEDD hand tools, hook and line kits for pulling a suspect item apart from a distance, a remote firing initiator, x-ray solutions for imaging a device in place, telescopic and general search equipment, an IP mesh repeater for extending control range through buildings, and the Mini DRACO gas delivery system for introducing agents into a confined space. Support runs to round the clock customer service and operator training, and the company works with Med-Eng and J and N Tactical on combined solutions.

Customers are predominantly civil law enforcement rather than armed forces, and ICOR puts its reach at more than 60 countries including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, China, Japan and Thailand. In some police training programmes its robots have become the reference platform. Products are frequently developed off the back of direct user requests, which is why the range includes both catalogue models and one-off customised builds.

Ownership changed at the start of 2024. Cadre Holdings, the New York listed company behind Safariland and Med-Eng, announced the acquisition in December 2023 and completed it in January 2024. At the time ICOR was generating around 26 million Canadian dollars of revenue for the financial year ending July 2023. The deal put ICOR into the same group as Med-Eng, which had already been distributing ICOR robots, and gave Cadre a robotics platform to sit alongside its protective equipment brands. ICOR has continued to operate under its own name from Ottawa, and Ottawa's cluster of unmanned vehicle firms, which traces back through Med-Eng, gained rather than lost a manufacturer in the process.