By Srinath Srinivasan
Hyderabad-based Vistan NextGen aims to make robots a familiar thing in services, industrial and social settings. The company, founded and set up by Rama Raju Singam and his wife Manjula Singam, was inspired by the nationalism going on in the country— to be self-sufficient. “We had a strong background in technology in the UK and European regions and so when initiatives like Digital India, Aatmanirbhar Bharat came up, it inspired us to come back to India with the experience we had gained,” says Rama Singam.
Today, Vistan makes a robot called Flunkey for service sectors, a social humanoid called VIHR and industrial autonomous robots called Tavio which is a family of robotic arms and autonomous ground vehicles for transport in industrial scenarios. “Today we can proudly say we have great capabilities in AI/ML, embedded systems and robotics. We are also localising the production of all components – hardware and software,” he says.
The chips, which are usually imported along with sensors from China, Germany and the United States, in this case, come from a local vendor. “As we scale, we have plans for advanced applications. In such a situation, we cannot be dependent on one supplier. For that reason, we are planning to make the chips ourselves with minimal import of components which can’t be made here,” he says.
The company has delivered solutions for facial recognition systems which can be integrated with payrolls in organisations. “Service sector today is keen on making last-mile services automated. The pandemic has accelerated the demand for contactless services as well,” he says.
On the industrial front, since more companies and warehouses have come up, there is a demand to meet their needs locally, says Rama Singam. Having ventured into making social humanoids, he believes that the prime usage for consumers will come from making robots intelligent to help humans improve their productivity and care by getting into the nuances of the user commands. In order to do this, the company has in house teams in deep learning, AI/ML, sensor and hardware technology. “ We also train local talent and help in up-skilling existing talent,” shares Rama Singam.
Vistan has also collaborated with National Productivity Council and believes that its a social responsibility to train non technical talent locally.
