- Coro-Bot has features like food, water, medicines to patients, automatic hand sanitization slot, and access to MS Excel and YouTube
- After healthcare, the fourth edition of Coro-Bot will help the hotel and tourism sector
- It is a golden opportunity for startups with packages, incentives and reliefs provided by government
While the entire country is under lockdown and the economy is stagnant, there are entrepreneurs like Pratik Tirodkar, a twenty-three-year-old, running three start-ups successfully, planning for the present and the future with the application of his immense technical knowledge and his innovation.
Keeping the present situation in mind and the crisis being faced by the frontline workers given how this virus spreads, Pratik has come up with his latest innovation, ‘Coro-Bot’ with a vision that it will prevent the frontline workers to come in direct contact with the infected patients.
A Glimpse of his Journey
Pratik is a tech enthusiast with expertise in the Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and grip on Python, R Programming, 3D Gaming, App Development, 3D Gaming, R pi, Arduino, ARM Processor, PIC, PLC, MATLAB, etc. He always looks forward to working with an enthusiastic group of people on any challenging technical project or entrepreneurial activity.
While completing his Diploma in Instrumentation from Government Polytechnic, Mumbai, Tirodkar found his passion and started his entrepreneurial journey with his first startup ‘Build My Project’. He was exposed to a plethora of technologies through his class assignments and took a step forward to learn more when he joined college by freelancing for different companies in the technological domain. He did his engineering from Bharathi Vidyapith college, Mumbai and like a true entrepreneur, he decided to invest his earning as a freelancer into his startup, thereby giving birth to two more startups – PNT Solutions and BMP Courses. Build My Projects (BMP) started with imparting lectures on technology to students from schools and colleges throughout the country with two additional members to look after marketing while he dealt with his academics and operations of his startups. By the end of his academic year, PNT solutions dealing mostly with automation and robotics was into the action.
Coro-Bot and its Features
Pratik is among those entrepreneurs who believe in quality than quantity. Before he was finally satisfied with what he created, he kept on innovating. The first edition of Coro-Bot tackled the issue of delivering food to the patients but his innovative mind couldn’t settle for it. He went on to work on the second edition of Coro-Bot which provided an automatic sanitizer vending machine and created the provision for LED lights.
I was not satisfied with the first two editions of Coro-Bot because I wanted it to be useful and at the same time unique and different from what already exists in the market. So I worked on the model further to come up with the third edition of Coro-Bot.
Pratik Tirodkar,
Owner, PNT solutions
Being an IoT enabled device, Coro-Bot will defy the normal conventions of being controlled. Coro-Bot will be armed with three plates, each one of which shall be capable of holding 15-20kgs and can be used to serve the patients' food, water, and medicines. That’s not all. It will have a water tanker to store water, tea, coffee, or any liquid substance as per the requirement of the officials. It’ll further have a storage capacity of around 30 kgs which can be used to store additional requirements of the patients.
“I understand the need for sanitization under the current circumstances. Thereby, Coro-Bot shall have an automatic sanitization system that’ll ask the patient to sanitize their hands before the food is served to them. All the patients need to do is place their hands under the dedicated sanitizing slot. Not just that, keeping the fact in mind that while Coro-Bot delivers food to the patients it might come in contact with the virus, Coro-Bot has a self sanitization mechanism for the same.” What more, it will have access to computerized features like MS Excel, YouTube, and the likes. “At present Coro-Bot has more than 20 features in it,” said Pratik
Coro-Bots at Healthcare
To cater to the need in the market, Pratik has expanded his team of eight to a team of twenty to work on the manufacturing. Moreover, the Kalyan Constituency looks forward to donating Coro-Bots to hospitals as a means of lending helping hands to the frontline workers in the Thane district.
At present, we have installed two Coro-Bots at the Holy Cross hospital in Kalyan. We have around 20 Coro-Bots lined for the production and hope to be done with them soon.
Future of Robotics in India
Although other countries have already embraced the concept of robotics and have been employing them in different sectors, India is slowly progressing towards it. In the upcoming years, after the acceptance of home and industrial automation, every household shall require the application of robotics to operate. Therefore, the scope of robotics is immense. “Keeping that in mind, we are manufacturing small and budget-friendly robots to cater to the day-to-day life operations,” explained Pratik.
Future plans
Because COVID-19 is here to stay, the company is looking forward to the fourth edition of Coro-Bot and similar robotic applications for the hotel and tourism industries.
“Catering to the old proverb, ‘prevention is better than cure’, physical distancing is the only means for survival. Therefore, we are working on more such innovative applications to serve different domains, which will make it easier or the nation to face this pandemic,” says Pratik.
Scope for Startups
“It is a golden opportunity for industries, especially startups, given the packages, incentives, and reliefs being provided by the government. This is bound to trigger and stimulate young minds and entrepreneurs to think out of the box regarding the products or services they want to offer to the nation,” says Pratik.
You can reach Pratik Tirodkar at, tirodkarpratik@gmail.com
