A Robotic Automation Startup Success Story
Normally, essentially the most profitable enterprises immediately handle the challenges going through completely different communities and stakeholders. The story of a startup’s journey to success is exclusive and particular, ensuing from the passionate efforts of entrepreneurs. On this article, you’ll discover the story of Czechia-based RoboTwin, an modern robotic automation startup, and its journey from trade impulse by way of validation to a first-generation product.
RoboTwin builds Movement-Imitating Robotic Automation Options
Automation isn’t a brand new factor. Many industries have developed and adopted automation methods – a traditional instance is robots engaged on conveyor belts. The standard method to automation replaces educated employees with “generalist” robots. For specialised duties, similar to spray portray or coating, this implies dropping the know-how and expertise of expert specialists.
RoboTwin’s co-founding staff, from left to proper: Ladislav Dvořák, Megi Mejdrechová, and David Polák.
RoboTwin offers an alternate method to automation primarily based on movement monitoring and imitation, permitting specialised employees to tackle different significant duties. Whereas an skilled employee demonstrates how the paint job is completed on the primary product within the sequence, RoboTwin tracks their movement and processes this knowledge right into a robotics program. The robotic is then capable of imitate their actual motions and may end the opposite merchandise within the sequence.
Setup: earlier than movement educating begins
Last end result: a robotic arm imitates handbook spray coating
Founder’s Profile: Megi Mejdrechová, Co-Founder & CTO at RoboTwin
For some folks, entrepreneurship is a calling. Nonetheless, Megi Mejdrechová, a Czech engineer, doesn’t put herself into this class. In case you would have requested her a couple of years in the past, she in all probability would have stated that entrepreneurship was unappealing to her. She loved the extra analytical and technical nature of the engineering area: “I actually love technical duties, improvement, fixing challenges, and making one thing work”.
One query was instrumental in her resolution to co-found RoboTwin in 2020: was she creating something helpful, which improves trade, the setting, or folks’s lives?
On the finish of her research, she realized that she held the reply to this query in her fingers: “after graduating I had the prospect to work alone innovation, which I consider has the potential to make the manufacturing trade a greater and safer place”. The facility to comply with her personal beliefs and create a optimistic affect finally made entrepreneurship engaging to her.
Being a younger lady in a male-dominated high-tech area solely provides to the problem. Nonetheless, Mejdrechová doesn’t see it that means: “I feel it may be a bonus. You’re extra seen, individuals are , and you’ll be a part of a robust ladies co-founder group which may be very supportive and welcoming.”
The Journey of RoboTwin — from Prototype to Market
Instructing a robotic to color by way of movement imitation.
In 2019, a Czech spray portray firm approached the Czech Technical College. The corporate’s purely handbook processes meant that staff would spray paint a whole sequence of merchandise by hand – a laborious, soiled, and unhealthy job. Additional, these processes should not scalable, and the corporate needed to decline orders resulting from a scarcity of workforce. Since they didn’t discover a appropriate resolution in the marketplace, they turned to the college.
It rapidly turned out that the majority small and medium-sized paint outlets, of which there are 250 in Czechia alone, nonetheless spray paint manually. Many wish to robotize their manufacturing, however the specialised nature of their portfolio meant that that is both not attainable, or costly and inefficient.
Mejdrechová, a pupil on the Czech Technical College on the time, took up the problem of growing an answer. Her objective: assist automate a producing trade nonetheless reliant on a human workforce, and thus cut back the variety of hours these folks spend in unhealthy and even poisonous environments doing repetitive duties.
“I used to be very enthusiastic about this matter and took this very significantly. It was merely not acceptable to me that so many individuals are nonetheless working in such circumstances,” says Mejdrechová. She designed a solution to robotize small-scale industrial portray simply and effectively: “with the help of my supervisor, I attempted out this movement tracking-based method. We consulted with the paint store, which helped me loads to give attention to a user-friendly resolution”. Finally, a prototype was efficiently examined immediately in a portray cell. It’s on this expertise that RoboTwin’s resolution is predicated.
RoboTwin Impresses the Startup Neighborhood – from EIT Jumpstarter to ViennaUP’22
In 2022, the RoboTwin staff spent 5 days in Vienna as a part of the Uncover Vienna: Manufacturing Version program in the course of the ViennaUP’22 startup competition. This system offers help to promising industrial startups from Central and Japanese Europe to entry the Austrian market.
Dr. Megi Mejdrechová (proper) accepts the primary prize at EIT Manufacturing’s BoostUp! East 2022 competitors © Matthias Heschl
Throughout Uncover Vienna, RoboTwin competed in BoostUp! East, the regional version of EIT Manufacturing’s competitors for startups and scaleups. They took dwelling the primary prize within the SwitchOn class – the competitors for early-stage startups. As a part of the prize, RoboTwin acquired four-month-long help from EIT Manufacturing tailor-made to the person startups’ wants. For RoboTwin, the main target was on the event and deliverables of a improvement technique, together with a marketing strategy, revenue and loss sheet, money circulate sheet, and pitch deck.
This help proved helpful for the Czech startup: “EIT Manufacturing has expertise with enterprise creation, they know the European market and perceive the wants of a high-tech startup. We belief them and focus on our doubts brazenly and to the purpose”, says Megi Mejdrechová
In 2022, Mejdrechová and her startup RoboTwin have been chosen for and went on to win EIT Manufacturing RIS LEADERS. LEADERS is a contest underneath the Regional Innovation Scheme (RIS) for girls innovators in manufacturing working in European nations with reasonable to modest ranges of innovation.
Dr. Megi Mejdrechová, Co-founder and CTO of RoboTwin, was acknowledged by EIT Manufacturing RIS for her function as a girl innovator in manufacturing.
RoboTwin additionally utilized for EIT Manufacturing’s Name for Proposals 2023, which helps modern manufacturing-related initiatives within the prototype stage, with the goal of launching merchandise to the market in a single 12 months.
“Yearly I spent engaged on our mission was extra thrilling than the earlier one. I consider that due to the varied technique of help from EIT Manufacturing, we’ve all the pieces to maintain this development entering into 2023. The supplied funding may give us an distinctive increase to attain our objectives and fulfill our dream – to deliver RoboTwin to market and allow the automation of adverse, unhealthy, and repetitive jobs in manufacturing everywhere in the world. We have been fortunate to achieve help from EIT Manufacturing CLC East. Their help is priceless”.
– Megi Mejdrechová, Co-founder and CTO at RoboTwin
EIT Manufacturing — Making Innovation Occur!
EIT Manufacturing is one in all 9 ‘Information and Innovation Communities’ (KICs) supported by the European Institute of Innovation and Expertise (EIT), a physique of the European Union. It brings collectively startups, companies, analysis facilities, and universities to strengthen cooperation within the European manufacturing ecosystem. It’s targeted on constructing innovation ecosystems for manufacturing that add distinctive worth to merchandise, processes, and companies and encourage the creation of worldwide aggressive and sustainable manufacturing.
EIT Manufacturing’s Co-Location Heart (CLC) East, primarily based in Vienna, is one in all six innovation hubs and companies seven nations in Central and Japanese Europe.
Are you a startup or enterprise taken with working or collaborating with RoboTwin? Attain out to the staff by connecting via Linkedin or immediately by way of the next emails:
_____
Sharing is Caring!
