Machine's learning

Covid-induced automation in industries can be a double-edged sword

- SNEHA BHURA

Dirty, dangerous and dull. These three words have guided Pulkit Gaur's life's work ever since he set up Gridbots, one of India's first robotics companies, in 2007. “We are in places where humans cannot go,” says Gaur, on phone from the company’s head office in Ahmedabad. His robots go into foundries where metal scrap is melted in blast furnaces, with temperatures going up over 1,500 degrees Celsius. In 2011, he created submersible robots—SaUsR (smart automation underwater service robot)—for cleaning tanks at a nuclear facility, where humans are kept out because of the high radiation. This earned him a deal with Bhabha Atomic Research Centre. “I help them solve very difficult, dangerous problems,” says Gaur.

He was declared Innovator of the Year by the MIT Technology Review in 2011 and has also received a TED Fellowship in the US. A mechanical engineering graduate from Jodhpur, he has an enviable portfolio, with clients like the Union home ministry, National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, Indian Navy, Oil and Natural Gas Corporation, ISRO, and the Gujarat Police. But the pandemic has seen him speed up work on the robo-labourer concept. And they do not deal with dirty, difficult and dangerous work like furnace tapping or radioactive waste.