St. Clair County Community College will be opening a new state-of-the-art health science building on September 27 after a $9.8 million Capital Outlay project. The building will be fully equipped with many new technologies including a fully autonomous commercial robotic floor scrubber. The device’s name is Neo and has quite the story. Neo was built by Pablo Molina and Faizan Sheikh who met while attending college at the University of Waterloo. In 2014, the pair started the company now call Avidbots in Kitchener, Ontario where they created a fully autonomous commercial robotic floor scrubber. After various trials and errors, the two created a prototype named Scrubby. Through 8 different designs, a bot was finally created that worked to the needed specifications. That’s where the new robotic scrubber, Neo, began. Now, SC4 in Port Huron will become the first demonstration site for the robot in the state of Michigan. Avidbots now employs over 140 people and has the autonomous robotic floor scrubber working within several companies around the world. To see Neo and the new health sciences building, the community is invited to SC4 Health Sciences’ open house on September 27th.
