It is a great time to build robots in India

Robots have been around a long time. But the advances in software and hardware in recent years have dramatically increased the applications. That was the subject of our webinar last week, and we had with us two entrepreneurs who have built amazing robotics companies – Balaji Viswanathan of Invento Robotics, and Aakash Sinha of Omnipresent Robot Tech.

Viswanathan said Covid-19 has dramatically increased opportunities for robotics, especially in healthcare. “We are automating the task of medical assistants in many of the hospitals that enables far better data collection. Our robots use the power of voice and vision to deliver strong conversation experience to collect vitals with onboard sensors, and push the data to EHR (electronic health records). They have autonomous navigation to cover the hospital floor,” he said.

Sinha said they have built robots for river cleaning, for picking trash, for bomb disposal. They even built the robot/rover for the last Chandrayaan mission, which crash landed on the moon. “We have also built drones. Over the last 2-3 years, 90% of our business has come through drones,” Sinha said. These are used in oil refineries, to keep the facilities secure, go into tanks to check for corrosion; they are used to map vast areas. “In Amaravati, we mapped 2 lakh acres and made it into one single image,” Sinha said.

Viswanathan urged young entrepreneurs to take up robotics development and manufacturing. Robotics, he said, is going to be far bigger than the computing industry. “The computing industry created over 50 companies with a market cap of $100 billion. Robotics can create even more. Industry 4.0 can create well-paying jobs that are far more impactful than IT and software,” he said.

India, he said, can do high-end manufacturing and we have a cost advantage over China. “China is increasingly becoming costly to operate. Many entrepreneurs there are looking to invest here. This is a time for India to get into manufacturing aggressively,” he said.

Viswanathan said about 60% of a robot is software and 40% is hardware. Sinha said more and more innovation in the future will happen in software, while hardware will tend to stabilise.