Real Life Robotics / About
About
We sold the robots. Then we watched what happened next.
Real Life Robotics builds Passenger, the automation governance platform. The company exists because the people who founded it spent a decade putting autonomous machines into organisations, and saw what those organisations were left holding afterwards.
Cameron Waite
Founder and Chief Executive
Cameron joined Aeryon Labs as its first commercial hire and its twentieth employee, selling unmanned aerial systems to police services, militaries and industrial operators at a point when most buyers had never authorised one. Aeryon was acquired by FLIR Systems in January 2019. He went on to Avidbots, taking autonomous floor-scrubbing robots into retail and facilities operations at scale.
Across both, the same thing happened after the sale. A customer would run one system successfully, then be offered a second from a different supplier, and discover there was nothing to plug it into. No shared rules. No independent view of what either machine was doing. No common operating record existed independently of the individual supplier environments. The accountability sat with whoever had signed, and the instruments sat with whoever had sold.
He founded Real Life Robotics to deliver robots, and hit the same wall from the other side. The company has run delivery machines for the Toronto Zoo, the City of Kitchener and the City of Markham, and supported autonomous delivery deployments with SKIP in the City of Markham, helping connect the customer food delivery experience with real-world robotic operations. Every one of those operators eventually asked a version of the same question: who is holding the rules for all of this.
Passenger answers that question. The Automation Governance Framework writes the answer down in a form anyone can pick up, competitors included.
“The operator I care about has three or four different robots from different vendors, and they are all stuck in pilot hell.”
Cameron Waite
Every machine works. Nothing governs them together.
Pilot hell rarely comes down to the technology. Without the layer above the machines, nobody can decide what to keep and what to stop paying for.
Where the experience comes from.
- Aeryon Labs
First commercial hire and twentieth employee. Unmanned aerial systems sold into public safety, defence and industrial operators. Acquired by FLIR Systems, January 2019.
- Avidbots
Autonomous cleaning robots deployed into retail and facilities operations, where an operations leader signs the cheque and a technology one never appears.
- Real Life Robotics
Delivery robots in service with the Toronto Zoo, the City of Kitchener and the City of Markham, and autonomous delivery deployments supported with SKIP in the City of Markham. Work alongside Indro Robotics, the University of Waterloo and Western University.
- AI for Good Summit
Featured company and speaker at the International Telecommunication Union’s AI for Good Summit in Geneva.
We publish the rules we get judged against.
The framework stays open
We publish the Automation Governance Framework under Creative Commons Attribution. Anyone may adopt, adapt and cite it, including suppliers who compete with us. A governance standard only one vendor can meet fails as a standard.
The record belongs to the operator
Evidence only the supplier can read stops counting as evidence. The organisation running the operation holds what Passenger collects, in a form it can carry elsewhere.
Eight parts, and the bar we hold ourselves to
The framework sets the bar we hold our own product to. The platform page walks each of the eight parts and shows what Passenger does against it.
Start with what you already run.
Thirty minutes on the systems in service on your site, and on what one set of rules over them would change.