University of Waterloo students may soon be able to order pizza or a burger from a nearby plaza and have it brought to campus by Canada’s first all-weather autonomous delivery robot.
About 13 years ago, four friends and mechatronics engineering students at the University of Waterloo were building robots in university labs and their own basements. From those humble beginnings, Clearpath Robotics has become a multi-million-dollar global enterprise that now employs 320 people and has their sights set on the moon.
Nityanand Varma left his native India in the early 1960s to do a master’s degree in civil engineering at the University of Waterloo. Now a proud alumnus, he and his family are helping the university grow in a way he would never have imagined possible via a $1-million contribution to fund a new professorship in robotics.
When Pablo Molina (BASc ’11), chairman, CTO, VP of Product and co-founder of Avidbots, wanted to improve his company's flagship autonomous floor-scrubbing robot, he turned to his former University of Waterloo professor and mentor, William Melek, for help.
Professor Stewart McLachlin, a professor of mechanical and mechatronics engineering and a member of the RoboHub's extended research team, has been awarded a one-year grant of $100,000 from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) for research on predictive tools to improve outcomes in invasive spine surgery.
Brokoslaw Laschowski is using his interdisciplinary education — spanning four academic degrees — as a toolkit to integrate robotics technology with rehabilitation medicine. While pursuing his master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering, Laschowski decided to intersect his passion for human biomechanics and engineering design by working with Team Canada wheelchair athletes as a researcher in Paralympic sports.
Brian Mao and Ben Zhang are graduate students from the University of Waterloo and members of a multi-university team that competed at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway in the Indy Autonomous Challenge. At the event, teams from across the world compete with self-driving race cars for a prize of $1 million USD.
Professor Ehsan Toyserkani, a professor of mechanical and mechatronics engineering and a RoboHub collaborator, published a new book titled Metal Additive Manufacturing.
A company founded at the University of Waterloo’s flagship incubator has performed the first autonomous robotic intramuscular injection, paving the way to improved patient care in an industry faced with labour shortages.
Cobionix, an autonomous robotics company located in Kitchener-Waterloo, performed the injection—without needles—using their Cobi platform.
Prof. Brandon DeHart and Alex Werner worked alongside Professor AJung Moon and her team at McGill's RAISE Lab and the Open Roboethics Institute (ORI) to design and host an international competition focused on ethical robots. The competition was held as part of the RO-MAN 2021 conference, whose organizing committee included five faculty and two staff from Waterloo Engineering.