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. 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. “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. 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 Bot’s drones washing Bank of America Stadium or flying around the UNC Charlotte and Davidson College campuses. 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. 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.

Full story : A Charlotte company is making AI robots to do America’s toughest jobs.