This robot company is building an Uber for autonomous material movement

Hachidori's robots do not need expensive infra like magnetic strips or QR codes. The firm aims to provide Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMR) that are easily deployable and affordable

Located in a lane in Chennai is an automotive component making factory. Inside the building, one can see many robots moving autonomously carrying loads from one location to other on the factory floor and working along with humans. These robots have been made by a startup Hachidori Robotics as various factories find it tough to maintain operations owing to rising labour costs and a shortage of workers. The robots have also prevented stress-related injuries. 

At a time, when an increasing number of smart factories or warehouses will require autonomous material movement robots, the penetration of such machines is quite low worldwide, as current solutions are expensive or cumbersome. It is this problem that Bengaluru-based Hachidori Robotics is solving. This includes providing material movement automation and logistics. Hachidori was incubated at Society for Innovation and Development (SID) at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc).

Its robots do not require any expensive infrastructure like magnetic strips or QR (quick response) codes on the floors. The firm said it aims to provide Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMR) that are easily deployable and affordable at the same time thus giving the best value for money to its customers. Hachidori’s patent-pending precise location technology is a big leap compared to the existing solutions.  Not only can the robots be deployed in live factories and warehouses without any interruptions to operations, but their life cycle costs are also just one-third of those of imported autonomous intelligent vehicles.

“Our technology is very similar to outdoor GPS (global positioning system) based autonomous cars. We are the first one in the world to use wireless natural navigation for indoor autonomous mobile robots,” says Janakiram Annam, founder and chief executive officer of Hachidori Robotics “We have applied for 3 patents for our Hachidori’s ‘precise location technology’. We use a combination of sensors, and our sensor fusion and machine learning algorithms enable us to locate our bot accurately within a shop floor or warehouse reliably and predictably.”

Hachidori competes with players such as Kiva, Fetch Robotics, MiR, Grey Orange and Hi-Tech Robotic Systemz globally and in India.

“Most of the competing solutions to Hachidori use Lidar  (light detection and ranging) based navigation which makes it unpredictable and unreliable when the environment around the bot changes significantly,” says Annam.

Hachidori is tapping a market which is worth around $200 billion through its innovation. This is because material movement is done mostly manually across industries either using trolleys, pallet jacks or manually driven forklifts. The problem of materials to be moved is across sectors including factories, warehouses, e-commerce facilities as well as hospitals and the hospitality industry. Existing solutions are cumbersome to install, require significant infrastructure changes and are expensive.

“With ever-increasing labour cost and growing problem of labour availability, the western world is staring at acute labour shortage,” says Annam. “India has already seen this issue in certain pockets and covid has shown the gaps in labour availability to keep the economy ticking. It will only get worse for the country.”

C S Murali, chairman of the Entrepreneurship Cell at SID said with the ‘Make in India’ push by the government, both large and small manufacturing companies are pursuing new opportunities. “Even though it appears trivial at first sight.  Moving material on the factory floor is a very important task both from cost and timeliness perspectives,” said Murali. “The co-founders of Hachidori Robotics approached us with the idea of addressing this problem and the industry experts that we consulted confirmed that a robotic solution is essential to most industries.”

Hachidori was founded by Annam, an ex-director, of NXP Semiconductors in 2019 along with Ramanathan Venkataraman, who is the chief technology officer at Hochidori. Venkataraman had worked at tech companies such as Samsung and Motorola. He has technology leadership in spearheading R&D efforts for over  20 years. The chief operating officer at the firm is Venkataraman Natarajan, who has worked at companies such as Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Motorola. 

Murali said given the varied nature of shop floors, navigation is a key aspect of the solution. “Unlike most similar solutions that use Lidar, Hachidori uses GPS based navigation which is more affordable and can deal with unexpected obstacles,” said Murali.

Hachidori provides various robots including ‘an autonomous unit load carrier and autonomous tugger and plans to introduce autonomous pallet jack and solutions for the logistics industry.

“We provide our solutions in one time sale or lease model,” says Annam. “Our customers can expect ROI (return on investment) from the first month in the lease model which makes it very attractive even for MSME (micro, small and medium enterprises.)”

As the demand for automation increases, investors and large conglomerates are betting big on robotics companies.GreyOrange, a leader in automated robotic fulfilment and inventory optimization software,  recently raised $110 million in comprehensive growth financing. A majority of this came from Mithril Capital Management and a distinguished group of current and new investors, along with separate financing provided by funds and accounts under management by BlackRock.GreyOrange reduces operating costs and expedites the delivery for global retail industry leaders including Walmart, H&M, COS, Coupang and GXO Logistics.

Early this year, Reliance Industries (RIL) picked up a majority stake in robotics start-up Addverb Technologies for $132 million (approx. Rs 984 crore) as the energy-to-telecom conglomerate looks to automate its businesses. Addverb has developed highly automated warehouses for RIL, Flipkart, HUL, Asian Paints, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, ITC, and Marico.