Cleaning the exterior of buildings is a dirty job, but also dangerous. Lucid bots entered the scene in 2018 with its Sherpa range of drones to clean windows in high places, and now he’s back to take on more labor-intensive tasks.
The Charlotte, North Carolina-based company, which was part of Y Combinator’s 2019 cohort, has taken on a new form as a robotics company with the thesis of building intelligent robots specifically designed to tackle “dirty” tasks that people don’t do. I want to do, said Ashur.
“We started with a very simple problem, and in our drive to make dangerous work safer over the years, the real problem we’re solving is this fundamental fact that people don’t want to do work that’s considered boring and dirty , dangerous or humiliating,” Andrew Ashur, founder and CEO of Lucid Bots, told TechCrunch.
Customers also kept asking the company if its drones were capable of cleaning flat surfaces, like sidewalks and driveways, in addition to the facade, windows and roof of buildings.
“We had this opposite problem where people were telling us, ‘If you build this, we’ll pay you for that,'” Ashur said. “As you might imagine for a flying object, a flat surface and gravity are not friendly.”
Making a robot that could do this was actually easier than Ashur thought. Lucid Bots had a common frame and brain among its robots. All that was missing was attaching different tools or payloads to the robots so that they could perform different tasks. Well, and a few wheels. There you have it: a robot capable of cleaning a flat surface. It’s called Lavo Bot, a pressure washing robot.
Drones are an industry in which some big players… fly. Amazon controls delivery drones, even though they are. I will no longer deliver to California. Google And PorteDash I also tried to participate in this. There are also all drones used for aerospace and military purposes. Besides Lucid Bots, some lesser-known companies, like Apellix, Prichard Industries, and KTV, have cleaning drones. Ashur’s goal isn’t necessarily to compete with companies like Amazon — it’s not focused on delivery, but rather on “building cutting-edge technology for old-school industries,” he said. he declared.
One advantage Ashur thinks Lucid Bots has is that cleaning drones fly within regulations in urban and suburban environments, spaces where delivery drones can’t even test today, Ashur said.
Last year, Lucid Bots completed a proof of concept in which a customer paid for two delivery drones of a certain size – a 20-pound payload delivery drone that can fly 10 kilometers autonomously. Lucid Bots looked at its core technology stack and product strategy and realized it could achieve this in less than a month. In fact, the company ended up doing it in four days, Ashur said.
“We are like an exception in the robotics landscape,” Ashur said. “We generate significant revenue. We have years of growth. We also have access to this very unique data set on how you can fly in these environments where most drones aren’t…
