Windsor-based robotics firm Optimotive has secured $2 million USD in investor funding to help accelerate the expansion of their business.
The investment was led by Version One Ventures with participation from Garage Capital and Detroit-based NewLab, and will allow the company to finish two new robotic products for use in the construction, mining and oil and gas sectors.
Speaking on AM800's The Shift, Optimotive founder and CEO Scott Fairley says the robots help capture information on large scale construction sites.
"This is typically a task, keyword being task, not a job, that is done by an individual on a construction project, and it is more of a chore and it's something that he workers that we talked to don't really like to go out and do. So what we did is we built a robot that can automate that task away from them, allowing them to focus on more meaningful things on the construction projects."
Fairley says two new robots, MULE and SCRUBBLES, will join their existing fleet of in-market robots.
MULE was designed for streamlining onsite material handling and SCRUBBLES was engineered to revolutionize site cleanup.
He says the company runs under a robot as a service business model.
"So think of the robots almost like little employees that work on the job sites and you pay them like an employee. So you pay them on a monthly basis to go and perform that task for you. Which is why the personality is important, because these are new coworkers that are going to allow the construction workforce to be more superhuman in their abilities and take all the little menial chores away from them."
He says the new funding will allow the company to scale up and build more robots.
"We have all kinds of customers lining up asking for more robots that can do different things and what this funding does, is it allows us go out and attack those different customers and start to deploy them at scale so we can truly start to validate what the business could become."
Fairley says robots should be used and sent into the most dangerous conditions.
"Working in construction can be a dangerous environment, so by having one less person on site doing a task that wasn't really needed to be done by a human, but being done by a robot, inherently can increase the safety of the site itself."
Optimotive says its existing robot fleet, IRIS and BOX, has set the benchmark for outdoor industrial automation.
IRIS excels at capturing & delivering precise, large-scale site data, such as 3D scans & 360 photos for BIM/VDC, and QA/QC for the renewables sector, specifically solar.
While the BOX acts as the central hub for autonomous robot operations, datauploads, and a reliable home base.