Making Bengaluru the Boston of India?

Nikhil (in blue), co-founder and CEO, and Gokul, founder —design, product and brand, CynLr Image: Selvaprakash Lakshmanan for Forbes India

Gokul NA and Nikhil Ramaswamy have persevered for eight years—from 2015 when they wrote one of their first algorithms to earlier this year when they opened HIVE, their state-of-the-art R&D centre that drew visitors from global automotive and industrial conglomerates.

They coined the name, hub for intelligence and vision excellence. And the 13,000 sq ft research space is equipped to accommodate 16 robot research cells, 25 robots, a cutting-edge electronics, camera and vision laboratory, and infrastructure to train and host 50 research and development engineers at a time.

CynLr (short for Cybernetics Laboratory), the venture that Ramaswamy and Gokul started eight years ago, is about to offer its first commercial product, a computer vision and AI (artificial intelligence)-guided camera module that could make industrial robotic arms far more versatile than they are today.

“We’ve had to reinvent the hardware on the vision side,” Ramaswamy says. And the result is a “universal” module capable of guiding robotic arms to handle objects under a wide range of challenging conditions—objects with mirror-finished reflective surfaces, for example, which can stymy cameras.

At the heart of the tech that these entrepreneurs have developed is the way they’ve innovated with a process called “convergence” to mimic something close to how human eyes detect things.
 
CynLr’s founders expect their camera will raise the object handling capabilities of robotic arms. They say it will lower the overall time of deployment of the arms by more than 70 percent and the cost by over 30 percent.

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Uses for the vision and intelligence technology will also extend beyond manufacturing and robotics, and into areas such as ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) and object search, they said in a press release when HIVE was opened in February.



Particularly in driver assistance, this has the potential to simplify and accelerate development of cognition by combining the benefits of RADAR (motion detection), LIDAR (depth detection), and CAMERA (colour detection) into a simpler system, much like the human eye, superior to the sensor-based systems available today, they say.

Partners and customers who’ve been trying out CynLr’s tech range from TVS Motors to Ford Motor Company and Airbus, and Flipkart, Wheels India and Brakes India.