Claus from Food Infotech had a chat with Koteeswara Rao Nagam, Head of Operations, Hachidori Robotics Pvt. Ltd., who spoke about their latest solutions offered for the F&B Industry, including the patented technologies developed by them for their Autonomous Mobile Robots as well as on their future product roadmap.
Read: August Issue of Food Infotech Magazine.
Please begin by introducing a little about your company and its business with us.
Hachidori Robotics is a Bangalore based Autonomous Mobile Robot solutions provider for factories and warehouses. We started our operations in 2019. Our company was founded by Mr. Janakiram, our CEO as well as one of the company’s core founders along with Mr. Ramanathan, CTO and Mr. Venkataraman, our COO.
We are a startup that has been serving a range of industries that include FMCG, automobile, automobile ancillaries, heavy engineering, including the Food and Beverage Industry. Today, we are delighted to state that our Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) launched few years ago is a 100% Made in India product that comes packaged with versatile features that can be customized based on the requirements of every user. Our manufacturing plant is located at Bengaluru and we have our offices spread across four major states that include Karnataka, Maharashtra, Delhi and Tamil Nadu. We will soon be opening an office in Pune later this year.
Can you let us know about some of the recent solutions that you’ve been offering for the F&B Industry?
For the F&B Industry, we have been offering a solution referred to as the lifting solution AMR. This solution carries heavy pallets of food, both perishable and non-perishable. It has a load capacity starting from 200 kilograms up to 1.5 tons. One other solution that I would like to mention is about the Dock and Convey AMR that complements our Automated Storage & Retrieval System solutions. While this robot can be moved throughout the production area of the warehouse, it also facilitates the transfer of raw materials to the place of assembling, shipping locations as well as other delivery points.
Can you tell us about any of the recent technologies that Hachidori has introduced in its products/solutions?
Presently, our company holds a patented technology for our AMR system that we consider to be highly unique and also allows us to do an Indoor GPS. This has been developed for the first time in India by us and is being used in our AMRs. Presently, we are working on extending the GPS outdoors. Both Indoor GPS and Outdoor GPS are going to be our next product innovations. We also work with our customers on customization in order to reach out to more businesses in the F&B Industry.
In what ways are these solutions benefitting the businesses operating in the F&B Industry?
For instance, when we take the example of a material handling equipment, there is a requirement to draw a workspace layout where the movement of robots takes place. In case there is a change in layout, there are high chances of the bots losing their position. However, our Indoor GPS would help in ensuring that the bot in not losing its position at any given point of time.
Once the entire layout has been explained, there will be no necessity to give instructions to the bot again since it would never forget the layout thereafter. Hence, these bots can become efficient and highly productive that are capable of being deployed in a large warehouse environment.
Would you let us know about any solution/solutions that have become highly popular among your consumers and also tell us why they were preferred by most of your customers?
The bot that I had spoken about earlier would only be involved in lifting and moving of pallets. However, in the recent past, we had introduced a new solution that we refer to as tugging solution. This has attained huge popularity among our customers. In this solution, there is a bot that can be used to connect trolleys, one, two or multiple trolleys that can move across different workstations. This bot is similar to a little train that goes around the factory.
This is another innovation that is being offered by us in large warehouses, including for the F&B Industry with an option for customization. Since most of the operators are not highly skilled, we are customizing our solution in such a way that the operators would only be required to press some buttons which would enable the robots to move across the workstation, as well as for reaching the drop point. Moreover, we have designed it in such a way that they are also easy to operate.
Are you working on any specific aspects of your solution/solutions?
We have been working on multiple R&D projects in the recent past. One of the areas that we are working on is the integration of mobile robots from different bot vendors. Just like in the case of a traffic management system, while we can have multiple bots moving in a gangway, some of those bots need not necessarily have to be our own bots. Our bots can simply be made to collaborate with the other bots, while not having to navigate around them. As mentioned earlier, this is similar to a traffic management system in a road, wherein, our bot needs to stop at the traffic lights and let the other bot pass through the area, while our bot subsequently passes through the area safely.
Can you tell us how Hachidori Robotics is staying unique and ahead of its competitors in the market?
We had obtained two patents for our technologies that are unique, which none of our competitors have at the moment. Further, the way we have developed the navigation and positioning for our bot in a warehousing facility is not available with any of our competitors. We hope to leverage this strength to stay unique and ahead of our competitors in the market. We are also continuously working on bringing new innovations in our products.
Presently, we are focusing our efforts to make our solutions available pan India, considering the fact that there is a huge market still available to be tapped by us within the country. We are an Indian company and all our products are Made in India.
How has the demand for your solutions been progressing in the past one year?
We are seeing a good demand for our solutions in the southern region, which is quite favourable to us. Our current focus is to expand our business in other parts of the country, particularly in cities like Mumbai and Pune, including in some of the states in the northern region like UP and Punjab. We are also seeing a lot of demand for our solutions in the north and we are planning to market our products aggressively in this region in the coming months. We have significantly increased our sales and marketing presence in Delhi and Maharashtra and hope to capture a significant market share in these states in the coming days.
Can you let us know about your business performance this year and also tell us what growth targets have you set for the coming year?
When it comes to demand, we expect to grow 10 times the size of what we did last year. 10x growth is what we are expecting to do in the next 12 to 18 months. Our company’s financial performance has met expectations in the last one year. We are optimistic about the growth of our business in the coming year too. Further, being a startup, our focus would also be on bringing new innovations to the market in the coming months.
A bit about your future plans for us.
After our inception in 2019, we had spent the first 2 years working on product development, while another couple of years were spent on product realization. Presently, we are scaling up our business across the country. As of today, we have 120 employees working with us who are directly on our payroll. We have plans to double the size of our sales and marketing team over the next 18 months by setting up offices across the country, both for commercial distribution as well as service support. Our aim is to become a market leader in AMR business in India in the next 5 years.
