Keegan Kozolanka

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1 / 5 Tarek Rahim, CEO and co-founder of Mirsee Robotics, shows the MH3 humanoid developed by the Cambridge company.

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Robots taking on dangerous and labour-intensive tasks sounds like something out of science fiction, but it's coming sooner than people think.

Waterloo Region could be at the forefront of it according to Tarek Rahim, CEO and co-founder of Cambridge-based Mirsee Robotics.

He sees this industry as having enormous potential as the technology behind the robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) exponentially grows.

In an interview at Mirsee Robotics on Grand Avenue in Galt, Rahim explained the company is one of two major companies in Canada designing and assembling state-of-the-art humanoid robots.

Humanoid robots replicate or mimic the human form, which Rahim said is important because, “the world and objects that surround us are designed for humans to interact with and if we want a machine that can be as versatile as a human, it makes sense to replicate the human form.”

The company, founded in 2017, is on its third generation humanoid called MH3.

At this point, Rahim said humanoids have been around for a while but are generally used in research and lab settings and haven’t been commercially viable for business.

That’s changing now, Rahim said, as costs have dropped significantly with each new generation and performance improves at the same time.

“Eventually they’ll be doing all industries, but for now we’re targeting critical infrastructure and control rooms,” Rahim said. “In these applications, the robots are embodied by human operators and they work very well for moving skilled labour into remote or hazardous work sites. The eventual goal is to add autonomy so you can start seeing these robots do physically demanding, repetitive jobs that people really shouldn’t be doing.”

As an example, Rahim explained the company did a water treatment plant pilot project at a First Nations community. Many of these communities experience boil water advisories and struggle to find skilled operators to run water treatment plants.

“Our robot can be used to basically teleport skilled certified water treatment operators from other communities and allow them to do the lab tests to verify that water is safe for drinking,” he said.

When AI has the ability to autonomously operate humanoids, Rahim believes this will dramatically improve people’s lives. This could happen sooner than people think.

“We are so close to super intelligence, it’s quite scary but quite exciting at the same time,” he said.

Rahim appreciates people’s concerns over displacement of jobs by humanoids but also believes the cost of goods and services will also plummet bringing a net benefit to society.

“The boost to gross domestic product will be so huge that everyone is going to be living far better lives,” he said. “I’m sure that there will be new careers that emerge where people can find more fulfilling work because the jobs these machines should be taking are the jobs that people don’t derive fulfillment from.”