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Centre for Pattern Analysis & Machine Intelligence (CPAMI) faculty member Professor William Melek will lead the RoboHub research initiative, which is funded by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation and the provincial government for a total budget of $4,600,000. CPAMI faculty members, among others in the Faculty of Engineering, will benefit greatly from this innovative facility. 

With more and more robots headed for the commercial world, a Waterloo Engineering researcher hopes to speed their arrival by developing cheaper, general-purpose control systems.

At the moment, the high cost of customized robotics applications in workplaces such as warehouses and manufacturing plants largely limits them to huge companies with plenty of money to invest.

The University of Waterloo's faith in the future of robotics is best demonstrated by its plans for a new engineering building that will be home to the RoboHub. The RoboHub will be the first centre in the world to combine aerial, ground, maglev (magnetic levitation) and humanoid robotics development under a single roof.

Student experience is set to reach new heights in RoboHub, the two-story indoor flight centre for humanoid, aerial, ground and magnetically-levitated robot technologies. It’s one of the innovative features of Engineering 7 (E7), the 230,000-square-foot, seven-storey building to be funded by the $70-million Educating the Engineer of the Future campaign.

Nowhere else on the planet will you find the same advanced robotics technology under one roof. It will place Canada at the forefront of this strategically important emerging field.

Prof. William Melek, Director of Mechatronics Engineering

Over $8 million in funding from the Natural Science and Research Council of Canada's 2015 Discovery Grants program has been awarded for 55 Waterloo Engineering research projects.

The RoboHub will be a unique and revolutionary robotics test facility – a state-of-the-art showcase for humanoid, aerial, ground and maglev robot technologies. The facility will provide a vital catalyst for innovation, bridging the laboratory and the real world. Researchers will develop richly heterogeneous robot teams and simulate complex, real-world environments, opening new multidisciplinary avenues to explore the potential of these combined robotic technologies.