Story About Driverless Vehicle Built By A 16-Year-Old And India’s First Humanoid Robot

Automation can be seen as a positive future for transportation, manufacturing, customer service, and logistics. And these developments are happening right in India. The robots are becoming more human.

First are sibling robots from Invento Makerspaces based in Bengaluru, Mitra, and Mitri. Mitra made its first appearance at the 2017 Global Entrepreneurship Summit. At the summit, the robot greeted important guests like Ivanka Trump and Narendra Modi. These robots are designed to become human’s personal assistants and are supported by AI (Artificial Intelligence) systems. The robots are equipped with conversation engines, facial recognition capabilities and sensors for indoor navigation purpose.

Balaji Vishwanathan, CEO of the startup, said that originally driverless vehicles are what he wanted to make. The company wanted to make driverless scooters, instead of driverless cars, since scooters could move easily within Indian city premises. However, as the technology and the laws were not ready yet, they decided to divert to indoor technology. A short time after that, speech engines and more were added to make a completely functional robot helper.

Currently, according to Vishawanathan, the most common places for robot helpers are malls and other retail places. In these spaces, with your permission, of course, will use your personal data to look for precisely what you want. Moreover, your face will even be memorized for future visits. Beside these retail places, Visshwanathan also envisions these robots working in other fields. Showing his excitement, he said three more years in the future, you could enter a hospital located in rural areas and be greeted by a robot.

These are just robot helps that can be our personal assistants but 16-year-old Saad Nasser is in the process of developing robots to work behind the scene. Together with Saurabh, he is Ati Motors’ co-founder, the startup behind Sherpa.

Sherpa is a completely electric driverless cargo vehicle. It has three wheels, two are in the front and one is in the rear. It looks similar to a low-riding cart that can drive itself. The main idea is to use the bot in factories, depots, and other industrial spaces.

Nasser says that the company wanted to do something that was an exciting engineering inquiry and commercially. Chandra explained that the idea behind Sherpa is to follow the authorities’ regulations. Five years from now when the law has been improved, and automated vehicles can join the traffic, they will increase the production of these bots.

At the moment, the Sherpa has two versions, one that can support a weight of 150kg and one is capable of carrying 500kg. Similar to the sibling robots, Mitra and Mitri, it’s fully conceived and built right in India.