Coimbatore Youth Designs Robot With Emotional Intelligence To Hold Hands & Empathise With Patients
With clients ranging from banks to clothing retailers, the five-year-old startup hopes to get robots more regularly deployed in concierge service. Founded in 2012, Vishnu Engineering is the brainchild of mechanical engineer Vijay V Shah.
If you were admitted to a hospital for treatment wouldn't you like sympathy, hand holding and 24/7 pampering? And who says it only has to be a human attendant. Coimbatore-based startup Vishnu Engineering has come up with a prototype for a robot with emotional intelligence.
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With clients ranging from banks to clothing retailers, the five-year-old startup hopes to get robots more regularly deployed in concierge service. Founded in 2012, Vishnu Engineering is the brainchild of mechanical engineer Vijay V Shah, 38.
A graduate of Vaishnav College of Engineering, Chennai, in 2004, Vijay's first job was as a mechanical engineer with the Shimato Group. "I saved up money from my earnings to launch my own mechanical workshop in Coimbatore. We fitted out hydraulic machines for the fabrication and automotive industry. I then started building my own models for pumps and two-wheelers. Then I got hooked into robotics," says Vijay.
Why Vishnu Engineering? "I was waiting at a bank branch when I realised how monotonous the life of a bank teller was. Over and over I found they were answering the same set of queries, performing the same tasks.
I thought such routine tasks could easily be automated to save precious time so that they can cater to more sophisticated needs such as possible investments of bank customers," says Vijay. And he hit it big when he designed India's first banking robot 'Lakshmi'.
"Apart from answering generic questions, Vijay also programmed the robot to connect to the core banking solution. If a customer wants to know his bank account details or transaction history, the robot can flash the answer on its display," says N Kamakodi, MD and CEO, City Union Bank (CUB), which has now six clones of Lakshmi at different branches. "From account history, interest rates on home loans, deferred payments, charges, CUB Lakshmi has been able to answer them all," he adds.
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After CUB became its first client, other banks like Canara Bank, Syndicate Bank soon sought Vishnu Engineering's services. Today, the startup is also catering to other sectors such as telecom companies, high trend clothing companies, malls and airports.
In 2017, Vishnu Engineering was also awarded ¡ª 'Most Innovative Company of the Year 2017' by the SWITCH Foundation. "In the last five years, my team strength has grown from two to 20. We have also built close to 160 robots in the last five years, which are actively deployed. Our robots can talk in 20 languages, including Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Kannada. They have been imbued with natural language processing so that they can converse with ease," says Vijay.
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Among Vishnu Engineering's other projects are using robotics to support Aadhaar systems and insurance companies to expand in rural areas. "For JLL, the real estate consulting firm, we designed robots for R&D application.
We are now excited about a robot for airports that can tell passengers PNR status, flight delays, hand over boarding passes, direct them, point out routes to gates or the cafeteria," says Vijay. But the biggest project for Vishnu Engineering is its work with hospitals. "We are designing robots with intuitive understanding and empathy. With AI, we hope our robots can calm down patients, talk to them. We want them to have the human touch as we increasingly move into a world, where humans don't prioritise relationships as much as they should; don't have the time to even say "hello" or visit their near and dear ones," says Vijay.
