The Town of Niagara-on-the-Lake's sidewalk inspectors look a little different this summer.
The municipality has hired Top Hat Robotics to conduct sidewalk inspections and document problems using human-guided robots.
The Waterloo-based company has done similar inspections for a number of other municipalities in Ontario, the Town of NOTL said in a news release.
Two of the robots were busy checking out sidewalks around Glendale on Monday.
“Typically, sidewalk inspections are quite labour intensive and take a significant amount of Staff time,” said chief administrator Marnie Cluckie.
Using the robots is faster and lets the town assign operations staff to other jobs, she said.
“Also, the robot’s state-of-the-art depth cameras are accurate to within one millimetre – much better than traditional human judgment.”