By Amy Feldman, on Forbes.com
On a recent late-winter afternoon, 31-year-old Faizan Sheikh, cofounder and chief executive officer of Avidbots, shows off what the company’s 1,050-pound cleaning robot, Neo, can do. Inside an enclosure made of thousands of giant white, blue and yellow Lego bricks at the company’s factory in Kitchener, Ontario, the robot goes through a quality assurance test, turning corners and scrubbing the floor as it goes. Lights along the bottom of the machine glow blue as it moves autonomously, then turn fuchsia as it stops to remap its route, aided by artificial intelligence. Once the machine is fully vetted in the Lego test zone, it will be loaded into a wooden crate and lined up with a handful of others that are waiting to be shipped to customers. Walking the floor, Sheikh, wearing a gray puffy jacket over a blue Avidbots T-shirt, can barely contain his excitement. “Avidbots,” he says, “is like a fantasy space for engineers.”
