Thousands of robots which were confined to research labs in India, are now finding their way into schools and engineering colleges.
The Robotics Institute (TRI) -- started in December 2005 by three friends and incubating at the Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SNIE), IIT Mumbai - has sold 1,800 robotics kits to engineering colleges across the country. Priced between Rs 3,000 and Rs 7,000, these kits could have fetched anywhere between Rs 54 lakh (Rs 5.4 million) and Rs 1.25 crore (Rs 125 million) to date.
For TRI, the focus is to cater to domestic and international educational market. The 24-year-old director of the company, Gaurav Chaturvedi, says, "First we will cater to the Indian market. India has over 2,000 engineering colleges and once we are able to scale up we will also look at the international market."
This is not a lone case. Students of the embedded real-time system (ERT) at IIT labs have created robots that are being used by various IIT departments.
They have provided these kits to 17 remote-distance education centres run by the IIT. The course bundled around these topics give the students the much-required practical experience.
Some students also spun off this research into a company called NexRobotics, which is incubating at the Kanwal Rekhi School of Information Technology's (KReSIT) ERT labs.
In fact, one of the students working at the ERT Labs is already working on a solution to automatically control oil spills for the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation.
Though still in the initial phase, the students are working on designing algorithms that will allow robots to detect and control oil spills underwater. Both the companies feel robotics has a great future in India.
Says Sachidanand, founder member of NexRobotics, "These robots are easily available in international markets but they are quite expensive and you will not find any support services in India."
For instance, he points out that iRobots used by the retail segment for cleaning purposes are at least $200 (Rs 9,000) but if manufactured in India, these will be cheaper.
The robots that NexRobotics plans to manufacture are anything between Rs 5,500 and Rs 30,000. The high-end robots will be ideal for R&D and defence purposes.
"The other differentiating factor about us is that the technology that we use is open-source, hence, all the details about a certain robot is available on our site," adds Sachidanand.
The group has put on display robots that can be used for commercial usage. For instance, sensor-based robots can be used in agricultural farms, which can help detect which part of the farm land has been irrigated properly or not.