Waterloo: “Out Where the Robots Roam”

West from Union Station
If you’ve got a feeling that robotics just might be the calling in life that you’ve been searching for, try this for a little confirmation. Take a two-hour train ride west from Toronto’s Union Station bound for Waterloo, Ontario.

Waterloo, powered mainly by the University of Waterloo’s excellence in robotics, mechatronics, computer science and mathematics, has built a remarkable reputation for itself as being Canada’s preeminent robotics hub.

But it always wasn’t that way in Waterloo. A former industrial center, now defunct, the city has been remade with technology.

During the train ride, with two hours to kill watching scenery roll by, use your smartphone to search for The Globe and Mail’s website. In the archives, there’s an excellent article by Mark Mann, from 2016. Out Where the Robots Roam, which is the tech backstory of Waterloo, about, as Mann puts it: “How Waterloo became a world-class robotics hub.”

Although written in 2016, the article harkens further back to 2011, back to when Pablo Molina and Faizan Sheikh (graduates of the University of Waterloo) recast their snow plow robot into a floor-cleaning robot. By 2016, their company, Avidbots, was readying their first batch of ten robots; and, going forward, they had orders for a further 10 per month. In the same town where the biggest tech lord formerly had been the ill-fated Research in Motion a/k/a BlackBerry, suddenly there was a new monarch: robotics.

On the heels of Avidbots, Mann writes, “Waterloo has reinvented itself as a 24/7 start-up factory. There are more than 1,100 new companies in a place of only half a million people, which makes Waterloo the world’s second-densest start-up cluster after Silicon Valley. (Greater Toronto is a dozen times Waterloo’s size but has only two or four times the number of start-ups.).”

All of that in five-plus years!

The majority of these companies “originated in the University of Waterloo’s engineering faculty, which is the largest in Canada by number of students, and so well regarded that it ranks in the top four feeder schools for tech titans like Google, Facebook and Apple, along with 864 other Silicon Valley companies that recruited [t]here in 2015.”

That was six years ago. A lot has happened since. That’s why it’s best to stay a week in Waterloo; a day won’t cut it at all. Rooms at Suite 76 on Regina Street are less than a mile from Waterloo’s downtown, the university’s campus, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, and the T&T Supermarket, for late-night munchies, etc.

Robotics coming of age in Waterloo is a wonderful true story that can be the fate of many other cities and countries that have a good engineering university, a fair amount of government money, put in the necessary hard work, remain persistent, and have a little luck roll their way.

Malaysia’s Johor has a great chance at it.  The Johor Corporation (JCorp) and the Malaysian Investment Development Authority (MIDA) were reportedly entered an agreement with Chinese robotics manufacturer, Beijing Huize Boyuan Robot Investment Company Limited for a robotic project that, over time, might resemble Waterloo.

Thailand’s massive Eastern Economic Corridor (the size of Connecticut), in conjunction with the government, and talent-supplied by the likes the National Science and Technology Development Agency (NSTDA), through the Institute of Field Robotics (FIBO), which offers undergraduate and graduate programs in automation and robotics engineering and manages a number of research laboratories, including the Bio-Inspired and Educational Robotics Lab, the Micro Robotics Lab, and the Unmanned-Vehicles and Autonomous Robots for Exploration Laboratory (UVAX), could well parley a Waterloo-type miracle.