
Bengaluru startup Invento Tech has developed humanoid robot Mitra to provide intelligent assistance to humans by interacting with them in various contexts.
Most of us have seen humanoid robots in the movies and on TV shows, but have you ever walked into a hotel lobby or your local bank branch and had one of these bots come forward to assist you?
This may soon be a reality, thanks to a bunch of startups trying to build and deploy such robots in India. One such team of makers from Bengaluru has developed a humanoid robot called Mitra.
In the first phase, Invento Tech wants Mitra to provide intelligent assistance to humans by interacting with them in office receptions and boardrooms
Viswanathan formed Invento Tech in July 2016 after he returned to India from the US, where he worked at a Boston-based open source security and management startup called Black Duck; he was a product manager for innovation. “While I was in Boston, my latent interest in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics was renewed. I started visiting makerspaces there and this got me interested in building a company focused on AI and robotics in India,” says Viswanathan.
Viswanathan put together a team of nine and started working on his dream projects. One of their first projects involved modifying a Honda Activa to convert it into a semi-autonomous vehicle.
Soon after that, the team set out to build the first version of Mitra and started demoing it at maker events across the country. Invento Tech also operates a makerspace under the same name in Bengaluru.
In the first stage of deployment, the company wants the robot to provide intelligent assistance to humans by interacting with them at office receptions and corporate boardrooms, which are the first point of interaction in various business contexts.
To be able to interact effectively with humans, Mitra has been armed with offline speech and face recognition technology. With built-in language support, it can answer a variety of questions. “The robot can identify a person by verifying his/her features in its database to check whether it has previously interacted with the person or not,” says Viswanathan. Mitra’s arms are capable of interactive gestures.
Even though the robot can communicate in natural languages, its conversational capabilities aren’t open-ended. They will be contextual, depending on where it is being deployed and the type of interaction it is required to have with humans in that context.
“The robot can identify a person by verifying his/her features in its database to check whether it has previously interacted with the person or not” — Balaji Viswanathan, CEO and co-founder, Invento Tech
This is not the first humanoid robot in India to be built for human assistance and interaction. In the past, some banks and other institutions have experimented with robots, but in most of these cases, the robots used were ones that could be bought pre-built off the shelf and customised depending on the use case. Nao by Softbank Robotics is one such bot that has been used for such deployments. Bengaluru’s Kempegowda International Airport was testing a Nao humanoid robot to help with passenger assistance.
One of the reasons companies buy off-the-shelf or imported humanoid robots is that very few people are developing them in India, because of the high costs and long R&D involved