It was an interest that grew from their involvement in the UW Robotics Team and then carried on into their final-year engineering project, which became an idea for a company.
“Robots take up a lot of space and so pretty soon, they were spilling out all over the place. We had some access to the robotics lab at the University; we had some space at the Accelerator Centre and we were using one of the founder’s basements,” says Rendall, chief executive officer of Clearpath Robotics, about how the company got started.
From those humble beginnings, Clearpath became a multi-million-dollar global enterprise that now employs 320 people, mostly in Waterloo region but also elsewhere in the world. It has customers in at least 50 countries. “I don’t know where else in Canada, you could have an autonomous vehicle company and have the same advantages that we have here,” Rendall says.
Clearpath now has an entire business unit devoted to autonomous vehicle technology that can move parts or products from one part of a warehouse or manufacturing plant to another. That business unit, OTTO Motors has “a portfolio of products and autonomous vehicle fleets running in some of the biggest plants in some of the most important manufacturing economies in the world,” Rendall says.
One of its projects involves working with Brampton-based MDA, the developer of the Canadarm, on software that will drive a robotic lunar rover when it is sent to the moon by the Canadian Space Agency in 2026.
When Rendall is asked about Clearpath’s success, he will cite a combination of factors:
“I would say the intellectual property policy at the University of Waterloo, where you can own everything that you invent, plays a big role." The co-op program is another factor, he adds. “We have sharp young minds coming in and learning engineering at the university, but then they go into workplaces where they figure out not only how to apply those skills but also have opportunities to identify real-world problems and try to solve them,” Rendall says. Those solutions sometimes become companies in their own right. The larger Waterloo ecosystem is simply a “powerful reinforcing mechanism” for startup companies, according to Rendall.
“There are professors who are entrepreneurially minded and tend to gravitate to Waterloo because they want to focus on their innovations. The graduate students who work for them will also be entrepreneurially minded and the undergraduate students are also exposed to that mindset throughout their education”, says Rendall.
"One of the great things about working in Robotics in Waterloo, and particularly on campus at the University of Waterloo is how much investment of time and effort, and money honestly, is going into engineering and robotics, and new forms of education and research", says RoboHub Manager, Brandon DeHart.
The ecosystem becomes self-reinforcing as co-op students who work for startups see “how exciting early-stage companies can be and the impact they can have at those companies.” That same ecosystem helped Clearpath Robotics grow long after it was spun out of the University. The presence of the University also enabled the company to establish important research partnerships.
Read the full article in the University of Waterloo Magazine.