Why ‘Factories will be the new products’: Gokul NA on the bigger picture behind CynLr’s Object Intelligence Stack
In this excerpt from a recent conversation with India Tech Report, Gokul NA, founder of CynLr, explains his view of the bigger picture in developing the company’s “Object Intelligence Stack” for robots.
Gokul, his fellow-founder Nikhil Ramaswamy and their 85-member team have put in some five years of R&D into this stack, which they see as a precursor to a general purpose “manipulation OS” for robots.
In this view point, Gokul talks about today’s challenges that large manufacturers face, with the example of the auto sector, in an age of rapidly shifting consumer tastes. Robots that could quickly switch from one type of task to another could hold the key to genuine personalised product customisation in cars and the gadgets that go into them and therefore serve as a source of market expansion for the OEMs Gokul argues.
Such robots could also help make factories and manufacturing significantly more sustainable by advancing material recycling —what if your new car could come from your old car or your new phone from your old phone, he asks.
Today that recycling is very costly and therefore not attractive, but a robot that automates the effort could change the landscape, he says. In this scenario, it would also be possible to go from centralised, gargantuan Giga-factories to hyper-local “micro-factories” that offer personalisation plus sustainability.