INTERVIEW
Aviation Update|February 2020
Aviation Update Editor Kartikeya in conversation with hidden gem and mastermind innovator Dr. Rao Tatavarti M.S (IIT Madras, India), PhD (Dalhousie, Canada), DRDS, FOSI, FAPAS and Founder and Managing Partner, CATS - CASTLE Advanced Technologies & Systems (CASTLE - Centre for Advancement of Science, Technology, Law and Engineering)
INTERVIEW

AU: What motivated you to start your company?

Dr. Rao: The Stockholm based SIPRA, an institute which deals with global security has come out recently with disturbing statistics indicating that India - a peace loving country - is a major, if not the biggest importer in the world of defence technologies for so many years. Huge amounts of our nation’s reserves were spent on import of technologies, making us dependent on the whims and fancies of other countries, who obviously would not be sharing the latest technologies, nor do they transfer the technology per se. I felt that this should be stopped forthwith, and one way to do that, is to develop indigenous technologies of world standards which can be commercialized so that we can eventually reverse the nation’s import process into an export process in the coming decade. Hence CASTLE Advanced Systems and Technologies (CATS) was started in 2017 under the Start-up India initiative.

AU: Where do you place yourself in terms of making a difference in terms of other similar organisations in the row?

Dr. Rao: CATS primarily deals with photonic technologies and products for a variety of applications in aerospace, ocean and land. The applications encompass both civilian and defence domains and were demonstrated to be have many advantages compared to any of the other existing technologies for similar applications. The core technologies for all our developed systems are based on photonics, and as such are not only novel in India, but also across the world and are therefore being patented. All our products employ state of art AI (artificial intelligence) and ML (machine learning) and deep learning techniques with superior capabilities. This therefore, enabled us to occupy an upper echelon of the strata in comparison to other similar companies.

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