Product Tank MTL #20 - Product + Robotics

Robotics has reached an inflection point in its development and is increasingly being commercialized in both industrial and residential settings. This is an industry burgeoning with opportunity, but challenges abound as well. Robotics falls at the intersection of cutting edge hardware and artificial intelligence, posing a particularly interesting environment for product development. In this month's Product Tank we will hear from three Montreal-based practitioners working at the forefront of the field.

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Speaker 1 - Riccardo Badalone, CEO of C2RO Cloud Robotics

Topic - How robots can be used to better understand the behaviour and needs of customers in the ever-changing world of retail.

Bio - Riccardo is an entrepreneur with a track record in architecting and building early-stage companies in the enterprise server and cloud computing space. Most notably, he was Co-Founder and CEO of Diablo Technologies Inc., which pioneered several Cloud and Virtualization disruptions including Software Defined Memory and Memory Channel Storage.

Speaker 2 - Francois Simard, CEO of Omnirobotic

Topic - 50 years after their creation, why are industrial robots still so dumb and how can they evolve to the next level?

Bio - Graduate from Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal in Mechanical Engineering, François Simard founded his first companies in the manufacturing sector in 2000 and sold it in 2010. Francois has extensive knowledge of the manufacturing industry, having visited more than 400 manufacturing plants in industries such as aerospace, military, automotive, food, and semiconductor. His passion for artificial intelligence and robotics led him to co-found Omnirobotic in 2016.

Talk 3 - Gregory Dudek, President of Independent Robotics, Former Director McGill School of Computer Science and Centre for Intelligent Machines.

Topic - Challenges and lessons learned from building Aqua2, a unique vehicle that can walk over rubble or snow, or swim for an hour 100 feet under water

Bio - Gregory Dudek had been working on robotics and intelligent systems for over 25 years. He is co-founder of Independent Robotics Inc., chaired professor at McGill University and lead investigator for the NSERC Canadian field robotics network.