Vyorius, a robotics company from India that began as a drone delivery operation has evolved into experts in connecting unmanned vehicles and making them the most productive possible. We talked with Vyorius Founder & CEO Nishant Singh Rana about the company, how it started, where it is headed, and where the world of unmanned robotics software is going.
1. What does Vyorius do? Who do you help, and how do you do it?
Vyorius is disrupting the age-old robotic integration problem for unmanned mobile robots.
We all have been hearing how the world is entering this new age of robotics.
It has been a decade, but we still have not created a segmented structure on how these robotics manufacturers, operators, and end-users can connect to be a part of a transparent, efficient, and mature ecosystem.
The problem in today's world is not about proving the hardware robotic system. There has been a tremendous improvement in the electronics, operating, and mechanical side of the robots. The major gap is making sure that these systems can work in a fleet for a business case and provide economic feasibility.
And this is exactly where we come in. We are creating a back-end infrastructure that allows any hardware robotic system with its mechanics in place to be a part of a fleet, manage orders, provide remote supervision, enable a single person to operate multiple such robots, automate its maintenance and provide transparency to the end client.
With that, we help operators to have the flexibility of choosing any hardware without changing the workflow and train the human workforce.
And allow the manufacturers to focus on their solution without the need to waste resources on half-baked software stacks that can't integrate with the clients' workflow.
2. How did the idea for Vyorius start? What was the path from idea to reality?
Vyorius's idea came to fruition internally when we learned about barriers to robotic operations while trying to run a drone delivery fleet.
We realized that nobody is bringing these high-tech systems into the old-school human-run workflows even when these solutions are sitting on the brink of cutting-edge technological advancements.
We came to this understanding about a year ago. As soon as the realization hit us, we started reaching out to other companies operating and managing robotic systems to validate this gap. After validating, we created an MVP and partnered with robotic companies to get feedback on the product and features. After that, we went ahead with the base MVP and built the components to create a hybrid stack that is internet-independent. Now, we can boast that we made the world's first plug-and-play ecosystem that can allow anyone to operate the most sophisticated robotic applications without having any back-end tech team.
3. What are your big initiatives for 2021?
This is going to be the most important year for us. We aim to connect around 1,000 robots and learn from them in order to establish an infrastructure that can truly be an internet of robots.
We are working with companies doing drone deliveries, building drone ports, delivering unmanned ground robots, and creating infrastructure for unmanned operations. We are looking to launch the complete ecosystem that will bring the command, control, management, supervision, analytics, and maintenance down to a single platform and run BVLOS operations with our clients.
We are open to collaborating on research projects, commercial pilots, and consortiums of different stakeholders that can utilize our solution to run their operations at scale.
4. There is already management software for drones and robots; what makes your approach different? [e.g., a new category of management tool that is not addressed today in the market)
This is the most important question, and we ask ourselves this every single day to truly provide the best solution out there. The current solutions include open-source software, hardware modules that need to connect with the robots, or solutions that take care of one specific segment of the complete value chain.
Our approach is very different because we focus on the operations of multiple robots to provide a solution that remains hardware agnostic and can bring every segment of the "undifferentiated heavy lifting" down to a single platform. This way, the user only focuses on the end customer and its operations instead of worrying about multiple cogs of its value chain not integrating seamlessly.
We are placing ourselves as a system integrator rather than a solution for individual robots.
5. Tell us about the team at Vyorius - something fun/interesting that we cannot know by reading your website or marketing materials
The team is unique because all of us come from robotics backgrounds, having worked on some exciting projects in the past. We designed the first e-VTOL delivery system in India from scratch, and the Department of Science and Technology gave us funding to create a prototype. We know each other for over ten years and have a fire and ice dynamic.
We have created the complete product without meeting each other in the Pandemic and have now perfected the whole work from home routine. At any point in time, our team consists of 11 Rockstar developers, which includes full-time, part-time, and interns.