"Automation Is Necessary To Attract Global Manufacturing Into India"

From having a hundred horses lug a few kilograms of load to a single autonomous bot carrying a tonne of payload, humans have surely come a long way. Fortunately, this isn't the end as the road ahead is even longer. Ati Motors' Founder and CEO, Saurabh Chandra, shares his wisdom with Yashasvini Razdan from Electronics For You on the future of bots in the material movement automation industry

Could you tell us about ati Motors’ journey?

We started our journey six years ago with the dream of making autonomous robots for material movement, inspired by self-driving cars, and not by traditional robotics.

Since 2021, we have been able to bring out a product in the market, which matches the industry requirements, and has the right specifications, price point, and functionality, allowing us now to gain traction with many good customers.

What solutions do you currently provide?

We have two products right now—the Sherpa Tug and Sherpa RollerTop. One move trolleys autonomously inside factories, while the other moves plastic bins in factories.

Could you explain your technology to our engineering audiences?

To put that simply, an autonomous vehicle needs to ask three questions in a loop—where is it, what is around it, and then what will its next step be that will take it towards its goal? As long as you can answer these questions successfully in a tight loop, you will get to your location. That at a very high level is what we do. We need to ask these questions every 100 milliseconds and we do that. Our product is ISO 3691-4 certified. That is the best safety standard for such vehicles available. Safety is very important, especially in automotive companies

Why do we need this technology?