TEECS Student at IROS2018 International Conference
TEECS 10T students Srikar Sadhu, Tejaswini Ashok, and Ujjayi Pamidigantam has developed a personal health assistant robot formed ROBOMIA LLC and built a business model around it, together they competed in EFSC2018 contest which is part of IROS2018 (2018 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems). Srikar Sadhu represented the team and pitched to the judges. More than 10,000 researchers and academic/professionals attended annual IROS event, 382 applications were submitted for EFSC2018 contest, 7 were selected as semi-finalists and provided a travel grant of $1500 and a free mini booth, top 3 teams were selected as finalists and one team was awarded as the winner. Robomia ended up as a finalist (Top 3) out of 382 teams.
Robotic is on the verge to a new area. While at the beginning of this millennium, robots that were designed to serve humans in their daily life, were still exotic niche products, 20 years later, new service robot applications are breaking their way into the market almost weekly. It is not the traditional robotics industry, however, which drives this development. It is startups and small companies who play the icebreaker and take all the risk that comes with creating a new market.
To foster that entrepreneurial spirit and to provide a platform to encourage researchers and practitioners to transition ideas and prototypes to commercialize products, the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (IEEE RAS) invites the robotics and automation community to participate in an Entrepreneurship Forum and Start-up Competition (EFSC) at the 2018 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS’18) in Madrid, Spain.
The event is intended to inspire, educate, enable, and empower researchers, students, young professionals, and anyone else who has the ‘start-up bug’ in starting companies of their own but is not sure of how to go about it. We also believe that this event will create an ecosystem that will provide the much-needed support for start-ups to launch their initiatives while being realistic about their envisioned ideas and products.