With their company Windo Cleaning, two young engineers offer a drone window cleaning service that allows the job to be done without any humans having to be perched high in the air. And they don’t plan to stop there: their goal is for their drones to be entirely controlled by artificial intelligence within a few years.
Published at 10:00 a.m.
Who ?
Sébastien Méthot-T. and Émilie Normand are graduates in electrical engineering from the École de Technologie Supérieure (ETS). They are respectively CEO and CTO of Windo Cleaning, a company that offers window cleaning services using drones.
Around ten customers are already part of their order book, mainly in Montreal, but also in the Quebec region.
L’innovation
It was while watching window cleaners working on ETS windows that Sébastien Méthot-T. had the idea that would lead to the founding of Windo Cleaning. “I told myself that it seemed complicated, that it didn’t seem effective, dangerous…”, he relates today.
He already had experience with drones, having been president of the Dronolab club at ETS.
The operation is, by its own admission, quite simple. Windo’s drone is connected by a long hose to a high-pressure system that sits at ground level, along with the drone pilot.
PHOTO ALAIN ROBERGE, THE PRESS
The drone is equipped with a nozzle which allows it to project soap and water (right) and is connected to a tank which is on the ground using a pipe.
In flight, it first sends soap. “We leave it to act for around fifteen seconds to a minute. Then, we rinse with deionized water,” he explains.
Deionization ensures that no particles remain in the water, so there are no marks when drying. No need to scrape the windows with a tool to make sure they are really clean!
A security perimeter must be established around the building to ensure the protection of the public in the event of a problem, as is already the case when workers clean windows.
After developing the technology in 2023, the two entrepreneurs began commercial activities in 2024, with two drones. Next year, they plan to hire two people to take care of operations, while they focus on sales… and technological development.
The future
The duo wants to succeed in automating their drones so that they can work without having to be controlled by a pilot.
This is where the role of Émilie Normand, who is currently completing a master’s degree in software engineering with a specialization in artificial intelligence, is crucial.
“The goal is not for the drone to be piloted by someone all the time, because there aren’t many pilots. And that the pilots are at risk of human error,” she says.
Its objective is that the drones are able to orient themselves in relation to the building to be cleaned, and that they cover the entire surface to be washed by themselves without returning to the same place more than once.
Currently, regulations require drones to be monitored by a pilot on site at all times. But as technologies advance, these regulations could be relaxed, entrepreneurs believe.
“As soon as legally we can, we would like instead of having a pilot on site, we would instead have a pilot in our remote headquarters monitoring. That way, he could observe one, two, maybe 12 drones at the same time to ensure that there are no problems,” says Émilie Normand, who would like to see such a scenario come true around 2030.
By developing this type of technology, Windo Cleaning would ensure that it stands out from potential competitors, the entrepreneurs maintain.
Windo Cleaning is part of The Entrepreneurial Base, an HEC Montréal incubator. She is also among the five finalists in the web show The Angels of Geniuswhich will be released in January 2025.
