Robert Bosch Engineering and Business Solutions, a 100% owned subsidiary of Robert Bosch GmbH, is developing a range of low-cost products in the areas of healthcare, aerospace, agriculture and electronic equipment meant for smart cities, R.K. Shenoy, senior vice-president, Embedded Solutions and Product Engineering said.
With a team of about 15,000 engineers at its Bengaluru software development center, the largest outside Germany, the company is making “frugal” products meant for testing eyes, tracking traffic violations, pollution levels, stream airport logistics and for farmers.
A pollution measuring device, named Climo, was made by Indian engineers. It uses advanced software and 11 sensors, both environmental and gas, to measure pollutants such as particulate matter, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, sulphur dioxide, presence of pollen, humidity, ultra violet rays and temperature.
Climo, developed along with Intel, has already been installed in India, Singapore, Germany, Sweden and Mexico. It is mounted on poles of between 10 and 12 feet of height.
“The basic idea was that the earlier equipment was bulkier and may be the size of a big room and a city can have only two or three. Climo brought the size to one-hundredth of it and cost-wise it is roughly around one-tenth from $200,000 to $15,000 dollars,” Mr. Shenoy said in an interview.
“The old systems could measure the level of pollutants in maybe once in an hour. Here, since the data is put online every minute, you can measure the data. You can do a lot of analytics in the cloud and use it for decision-making such as in Smart Cities to manage traffic flow, identify the cause of air pollution or industries’ contribution,” he said.
Bosch plans to sell Climo to large real estate developers to give input to the residents or workers on the quality of air, to authorities running Smart Cities, and industrial segments such as mining and construction.
“To start with, we will go with Smart Cities and then it will trickle to other areas like sensor-based parking and traffic management. We are also engaging with developers in North America to install them,” Mr. Shenoy said. “In parking, our solutions based on sensors and cameras enable a better parking experience.”
The demand for embedded systems in North America is expected to generate a revenue of about $89.87 billion by 2021, according to a report by Transparency Market Research. The demand will be mainly driven by the automotive industry which may take up 18.3% of the market value.
The company sources some of the elements such as sensors in car parking from third party vendors. In Intelligent Transport Management System (iTraMS), where you can track the car and its health, the core system is built by Bosch engineers. “Mahindra is our first customer of iTraMS. The system has an app which will track fuel consumption of the vehicle.”
“One can also do geo-fencing. In some countries there are restrictions like you can use a vehicle only for a particular region. There are close to 20 use cases for such a product,” Mr. Shenoy said.
“Within mobility one of our core teams is related to power systems which has gasoline, diesel, hybrids and electrification. On electrification we are working on the invertors, batteries and charging stations. We are working on global products. In Germany, they have been deployed.”
“We are working with multiple OEMs. We can develop the full infrastructure. We are working with one of the OEMs for two-wheeler and three-wheelers. The question is not how soon we can develop but how soon the customers can shift from power trains to electrified vehicles and the strategy of the OEMs on the issue of technology,” Mr. Shenoy said.
“We thought OEMs may go for hybrid but now they want to jump straight into electric. It is not a technology question. The challenge is with the energy needs as most will opt for fast charging. In cities it may be possible but so much of energy is needed. Second challenge is the spread,” he said.
Robert Bosch India has invested about 10 million euros on its labs in Bengaluru, Coimbatore and one in Mexico to test and validate the products.
“The idea is how we can do it in a frugal manner. We will improve the solutions and change it according to the environmental conditions. These are products adhering to global standards and can be deployed anywhere.”
Bosch Group in India, consisting of a dozen subsidiaries, generated a revenue of ₹18,300 crore in 2016 of which ₹12,950 crore came from third parties. Bosch India has close to 18,500 research and development associates.
