Name notwithstanding, Bandicoot is a good fella. It can lift heavy manhole covers, enter manholes and with its specially designed robotic arm, collect semi-solid sludge - there is a bucket attached to its arm - and climb out of the depths of the earth.
A group of engineers running the start-up, Genrobotic Innovations Pvt. Ltd in Thiruvananthapuram, designed Bandicoot in response to news of manual scavenger deaths in different parts of the country. Since then, the robot has been tested on the ground and is now ready for deployment.
There has been a growing demand for industrial robots in India. A lot of innovation is happening, especially in everyday applications. And while Thiruvananthapuram may be the home of Bandicoot, Ground Zero for experiments and innovations in the field of artificial intelligence and robotics remains Bangalore.
Mitra, the robot that greeted Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Ivanka Trump in Hyderabad last November, is also from Bangalore. It works as an usher at the Canara Bank headquarters on Bangalore's J.C. Road, where it can be seen greeting clients, answering a few basic questions and helping them find the right counter.
One also runs into Mitra robots in retail stores of the city. These remember returning customers by their faces and names, guide them to the right racks and even recommend new products going by their purchase history in their database.
One can also rent a Mitra for social gatherings to work as a photographer, a DJ and even to entertain guests with jokes, says Kaudinya Panyam of Invento, the Bangalore-based company that has developed it. He adds, "We believe it will be very helpful in hospitals, hotels and other places."
Next stop, the drawing room.
Vasu Reddy, a Bangalore-based software engineer, recently got himself a Roomba, a vacuuming product of iRobot,a US-based company with its franchise showroom in Bangalore. "You just program Roomba and it will go back to its place after cleaning the whole house. It can adapt itself to every small hurdle in the house and yet not leave a single corner out," says Reddy.
"If it is running out of battery, it will charge itself automatically at the charging counter and then go back to cleaning and complete its job. It needs no human intervention," says says Sanjay Kumar of Puresight Systems Pvt Ltd, an authorized distributor of iRobot Products in India.
And why is all of this happening in Bangalore? According to Kumar, it was a natural choice. "The innovations are taking place here and even the people are open to ideas like Roomba." Shailesh Shetty, a Bangalore-based Web designer seconds that. Most of his requests come from start-ups that are into robotics and AI (artificial intelligence). "If you go around the Koramangala area of Bangalore, you will find that every second start-up is doing something or the other in this field."
Kumar's and Shetty's responses enumerate symptoms, they do not address the why. Founder and CEO of Bangalore Robotics, Venkatesh Gurappa, takes a shot. He seems to think a major factor is that Bangalore is no longer the "software sweatshop" of the world. He says, "Bangalore has always been the place that produced quality engineers but their talent and expertise has been going to waste for two decades now because of the software and BPO (business process outsourcing) revolution. Many of them were getting into the wrong jobs because of attractive salaries. Slowdown in software jobs has been a blessing and robotics is seeing really talented guys entering the field and trying their hand at something many have been trained for."
Gurappa, who trains robot enthusiasts for national and international competitions, says that the quality of talent coming into the area is heartening. "Youngsters these days want to make robots in every field. Making everything unmanned is the in thing," he adds.
Gurappa talks about intensive research on the use of robots in genetics and on the factory floor. Robots, it seems, are also being developed such that they might be used in the armed forces, in the godowns of e-commerce companies and even as chefs in hotels and restaurants.
Surgical robotics is another area where a lot of research is underway worldwide as it is worth billions of dollars. Co-founder of Genrobotic Innovations, Arun George, talks about his company's alliances with global partners where surgical robots are concerned.
"This is a natural progression," he says. And while George's words might be peculiar to his own company, in the context of the robot fever that has Bangalore in its grips and promises to spread across the rest of India, they have the ring of a prophecy, a glimpse of the days to come.
