Randeep Singh

‘Anticipate the future’ is the shibboleth at Embedded Robot Technologies (eRT). And this is precisely what Randeep Singh, research scholar at KReSIT, IIT Bombay, and CEO of eRT and his seven IITian colleagues are engaged in at the KReSIT business incubator set in the verdant surroundings of the IIT campus at Mumbai.

The company is developing ‘artificial vision software protocol’ as a generic technology for various industry segments. The software protocol is expected to enable blind devices to act intelligently on visual actions, commands, and events. eRT is developing these technologies for off-the-shelf and platform-neutral modular components. Explains Singh, “Our technologies have small footprints, are fast, robust, task-specific and embeddable solutions for ‘blind’ devices, which will enable devices to see and perceive.”

Human obsession with vision hardware has become quite palpable in the last few years with Webcams, digital cameras and video conferencing become a part of everyday life. These devices have not only become faster and smaller but also cheaper. Elaborates Singh, “Now even mobile phones have vision capabilities embedded in the phone. The input vision data is there but the software to interpret this incoming data in real-time is missing. Our software protocol will enable this in a task-specific manner.”

If eRT’s founders have their way then the technology will serve the “ultimate need of robots and intelligent machines to interact with the real world” for autonomous tracking, navigation, interaction and existence. The company is planning to bring about cohesion amongst these techniques and develop new ones that will converge in complete user satisfaction.

eRT plans to take up the licensing model to market the product in the global market. The smart vision technology will be licensed to OEMs and eRT will earn royalty for every device embedded with the technology. This is expected to significantly reduce development cost, time consumed and efforts put in. Says Singh, “We are positioning ourselves as leading licensers of artificial vision technologies. We plan to provide customised solutions to our clients. depending on their requirements. For instance, a smart toy manufacturer may want their toy to follow the person when the user is moving around a room.

With an estimated market size of over $10 billion, which is a burgeoning one at that, eRT expects to break even in less than 15 months. Other than the booming sports goods market, the company is also looking at markets as diverse as video surveillance, R&D robots, personal and service robots, and the retail segment. Singh expects to have at least five clients by the end of next year. Says he, “Our priority is to target one client to demonstrate and validate the technologies in real life. There is a lot that can be done in artificial vision and it is almost impossible to exactly see the way humans see it. To give a ‘sense of seeing’ to blind devices is our ultimate dream. We also have plans to open a marketing office in Singapore in 2003.”