Whenever someone says robot, the first thing that pops up in my mind is Honda Asimo. A beautifully designed humanoid robot from the Japanese company, which is claimed to be the world’s most advanced robot, has been created to assist in the study of science and mathematics. There are other prominent robots that have been developed to ease the work of large machines and help scientists in manipulating artificial intelligence.
TAL Manufacturing Solutions, a Tata Group company, is expected to launch first ever India-made robot in the coming two months, i.e. before May 2016. Dubbed ‘Tata Brabo’, the robot has been showcased in the Make in India week in Mumbai, which is ending today.
Anil Bhingurde, COO of TAL Manufacturing Solutions led a group of 6 engineers, with an average age of 24 years, to design and create Brabo from scratch. The cost of development of Tata Brabo is Rs. 10 Crore.
In May 2014, Bhingurde had made a presentation on TAL’s robot initiative to Ravi Kant, former Chairman and Managing Director of Tata Motors, and to the board of the company. Ravi Kant liked the project, but wanted hundredfold volumes to be created every month as compared to the volumes put forward by Bhingurde.
Talking about the Made in India robot, Bhingurde said, “These are Made in India, Made for India. The idea is to drive automation in the market by offering affordable and cost-effective solution.” The name has been derived from a French word ‘Bras’, which means arm, and bot which is an automated machine. This means Brabo will be an arm bot in simple terms.
Details of the robot Brabo
This is an in-house developed robot with everything sourced under the same roof. The design of the robot has been done by TAL Manufacturing Solutions, styling has been done by Tata Elxsi, some components sourced have been manufactured by Tata AutoComp, and finance has been handled by Tata Capital.
The robot will be developed for micro, small and medium enterprises which require cost-effective robotic solutions for their manufacturing purposes.
Brabo will be priced at Rs 3 Lakh for 2kg payload, and Rs 6 Lakh for 10kh payload.
With the Make in India and Digital India campaigns in full swing in the country, it makes sense to create localized robots to fulfill the ever-growing needs of automated manufacturing.
Unprecedented growth of manufacturing sector in the last one year has given TAL Manufacturing Solutions and Tata group as a whole, an incentive to create India-made machinery and automated solutions for small and medium scale industries. There is a requirement of 1,000 robots in India every year, expected to grow to 5,000 globally by next year, according to Bhingurde.
Will Brabo be successful in front of foreign manufacturers?
The main advantage Tata will have is the localized manufacturing of the robot which will help it to price the robots lower than foreign players. Tata will face stiff competition from Nachi, Panasonic and Universal, who have started introducing their small robots in India, meant for the same target industries as Tata.
it is not wrong to say that the quality of foreign made robots will be superior as compared to Brabo, simply because they have been pioneers in this industry, but the true strength and quality can be tested only once Brabo is introduced officially to the industries.
One thing that perturbs me is the claim that the average age of engineers who developed the machine is 24 years. This only shows that the engineers are inexperienced, or maybe prodigal. But everyone knows that such complicated machinery should always be developed by more experienced engineers, or it will shoo away industries looking for products which have been designed by experts.
We will also have to wait to see how Brabo performs in the long run. Will the manufacturing pieces last longer and more efficiently than those from ABB, Fanuc and Panasonic etc which claim to have low after sales costs and more efficient machinery? Will Indian SMEs consider an India-made robot when there are expert machineries out there?
There are a lot of unanswered questions and we feel in another 2 months we will have a very clear picture. We hope TAL succeeds in its operations and proves us wrong in our criticism.
[Image Source: Rushlane.com]
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