A Charlotte company is making AI robots to do America's toughest jobs
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Lucid Bots' drones are routinely tested outside on perhaps what is the cleanest wall in all of Charlotte. Photo: Alexandria Sands/Axios
In a quiet industrial park in Charlotte, a small company is building drones and robots to revolutionize the American blue-collar workforce. And soon, those robots will be artificially intelligent.
Why it matters: Lucid Bots aims to become a leader in embedding AI into physical devices for a real purpose — creating robots that can take on dangerous work and freeing humans to pursue other meaningful tasks.
What they're saying: "You look at other robotics peers that have spent over a billion dollars in a decade to build a robot dog that has no job," founder Andrew Ashur told his 40-plus employees during a staff meeting this week.
- Right now, the company has one power-washing drone and a surface-cleaning robot on the market.
Driving the news: Lucid Bots, a seven-year-old company, announced Wednesday its acquisition of Avianna, a software startup that merges AI tools with robots. CEO Vic Pellicano describes Avianna as "the brain."
- Avianna has worked with other robotics companies, but Pellicano tells me Lucid Bots was far ahead of everybody.
- You may have spotted one of Lucid Bots' drones washing Bank of America Stadium or flying around the UNC Charlotte and Davidson College campuses.
How it works: Imagine a Roomba that's smart enough not to get stuck under the couch. Lucid Robots will marry two technologies (AI, like ChatGPT, and the body, like a Roomba) so their robots need less human oversight.
- They'll be like co-workers that you can boss around. Instead of constantly jolting a joystick, you're using plain English to tell the robot, essentially, "You missed a spot."
- Ironically, they're making the robots smarter with AI, but they'll be easier for the customers to use.
By the numbers: The drone starts around $35,000 and the floor bots are between $10,000 and $12,000, depending on upfits. The return on investment for a cleaning company or an entrepreneur who lands a few cleaning gigs can be high, says Robert Blank, Lucid Bots product manager.
Flashback: Lucid Bots was founded a few years before the pandemic hit but became even more valuable during COVID. People were quitting jobs in the power-washing business because property owners weren't cleaning empty buildings, Blank tells me. Many didn't come back.
The big picture: The future of AI can seem frightening, so I had to ask, could the robots take over the world?
- Pellicano says as long as there's competition in the AI industry, society should avoid a "Skynet" scenario where technological power is too concentrated.
- Ashur believes we're far away from "a fully self-sustaining robot ecosystem." There are still limitations, like batteries and lithium mining, he says.
- "What the leaders in the industry like us should all be talking about is, 'How do we continue to put responsibility at the forefront of discussion?'" Ashur says.
What's next: Power-washing is just Lucid Bot's starting point. The company envisions its robots replacing many demanding jobs, from farming to bridge maintenance.
- "We do see a future where anytime you see a robot doing something productive in the wild, like painting the side of a bridge, your first thought is, 'I bet that's a Lucid Bot,'" Ashur says.
- Lucid Bots expects to start selling its products with AI by the end of the year.
Take a look around the robot factory.
