Robotics event in Waterloo highlights insight, innovation and connection

The exoskeleton being demonstrated by the Human in Motion Robotics team.

Hundreds of roboticists and industry enthusiasts gathered in Waterloo, Ont. for a trade show to highlight the latest innovations in the tech world.

“We have top-notch leaders in the community of robotics. We are having panels, we have our brilliant speakers,” explained Alireza Saboukhi, the founder and CEO if Worldwide Robotics.

The Worldwide Robotics Hub hosted the networking event at Spur Innovation, formerly the Rim Blackberry campus.

“We’ve been slowly updating and modernizing and turning this into a data centre for sovereign AI and for private AI in Canada,” said Spur’s CEO Sharif Virani.

From lunar rovers to autonomous flying drones, technology spanning across various sectors were on display at first of its kind show in Ontario.

“The reality is that robotics by itself is a multidisciplinary field. So it consists of different fields and different engineering topics that work together, and it solves different kinds of problems,” said Saboukhi.

The goal was to get likeminded people from the industry all under one roof to promote collaboration.

“Physical AI will be one of the ways that Canadians get introduced to AI and automation in their lives through these dull, dirty, dangerous jobs that people don’t want to do anymore and will be repurposed with robots,” said Spur Innovation’s CEO Sharif Virani. “It’s still a human’s world, robots just work in it.”

Human in Motion Robots made the trip from Vancouver, B.C., to take part in the showcase. Their team has been working for over a decade on a wearable exoskeleton to help people with mobility issues due to neurological disorders.

“It’s a medical device, so we started working on this technology in 2016. We made lots of successful prototypes until this one, which is the production unit and it’s ready for sale,” said Behzad Peykari, the chief innovation officer and vice president of engineering with the company.

One of the units sell for roughly $230K, but developers say you can’t put a price on mobility.

“When the person is trying our exoskeleton for the first time, once they stand up, all the tears burst out because they couldn’t stand or walk for many years,” Peykari said.

Waterloo’s own Clearpath Robotics was also showing off their robots that are being used for research and everyday tasks.

“You can increase efficiency of your business, increase the dialog, reduce the down time. Those are the kinds of things you can do,” Aniket Goyal said, who is the account executive in sales for Clearpath.

The event drove home the notion that robots aren’t just for scientists and have many uses in everyday life.

“They can deliver your food while using a sensor to pick up on cracks in the sidewalk and that information is fed to the city,” said Virani.

“So we have a real opportunity here in Canada to move forward in a more informed and intentional way while also pushing forward our economy.”