A Robotic Automation Startup Success Story

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Often, probably the most profitable enterprises instantly deal with the challenges going through totally 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 revolutionary robotic automation startup, and its journey from business impulse via 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 skilled staff with “generalist” robots. For specialised duties, reminiscent of spray portray or coating, this implies dropping the know-how and expertise of expert specialists.

RoboTwin’s co-founding crew, from left to proper: Ladislav Dvořák, Megi Mejdrechová, and David Polák.

RoboTwin supplies another method to automation based mostly on movement monitoring and imitation, permitting specialised staff to tackle different significant duties. Whereas an skilled employee demonstrates how the paint job is completed on the primary product within the collection, RoboTwin tracks their movement and processes this knowledge right into a robotics program. The robotic is then in a position to imitate their actual motions and may end the opposite merchandise within the collection.

RoboTwin Startup

Setup: earlier than movement educating begins

RoboTwin Startup

Remaining end result: a robotic arm imitates guide 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 the event you would have requested her a number of years in the past, she most likely would have mentioned that entrepreneurship was unappealing to her. She loved the extra analytical and technical nature of the engineering discipline: “I actually love technical duties, improvement, fixing challenges, and making one thing work”.

One query was instrumental in her determination to co-found RoboTwin in 2020: was she creating something helpful, which improves business, the setting, or folks’s lives?

On the finish of her research, she realized that she held the reply to this query in her arms: “after graduating I had the possibility to work by myself innovation, which I consider has the potential to make the manufacturing business a greater and safer place”. The ability to observe her personal beliefs and create a optimistic impression ultimately made entrepreneurship engaging to her.

Being a younger girl in a male-dominated high-tech discipline solely provides to the problem. Nonetheless, Mejdrechová doesn’t see it that manner: “I believe it may be a bonus. You’re extra seen, persons are , and you’ll be a part of a robust girls co-founder neighborhood which may be very supportive and welcoming.”

The Journey of RoboTwin — from Prototype to Market

Teaching motion

Instructing a robotic to color via movement imitation.

In 2019, a Czech spray portray firm approached the Czech Technical College. The corporate’s purely guide processes meant that staff would spray paint a complete collection of merchandise by hand – a laborious, soiled, and unhealthy job. Additional, these processes will not be scalable, and the corporate needed to decline orders as a consequence of a scarcity of workforce. Since they didn’t discover a appropriate answer in the marketplace, they turned to the college.

It rapidly turned out that almost all small and medium-sized paint retailers, 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 potential, or costly and inefficient.

Mejdrechová, a pupil on the Czech Technical College on the time, took up the problem of growing an answer. Her aim: assist automate a producing business 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 severely. It was merely not acceptable to me that so many individuals are nonetheless working in such situations,” says Mejdrechová. She designed a strategy 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 rather a lot to give attention to a user-friendly answer”.  Ultimately, a prototype was efficiently examined instantly in a portray cell. It’s on this expertise that RoboTwin’s answer relies.

RoboTwin Impresses the Startup Neighborhood – from EIT Jumpstarter to ViennaUP’22

In 2022, the RoboTwin crew 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 supplies help to promising industrial startups from Central and Jap Europe to entry the Austrian market.

RoboTwin Startup

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 obtained 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 stream sheet, and pitch deck.

This help proved invaluable 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 talk about our doubts overtly 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 below the Regional Innovation Scheme (RIS) for girls innovators in manufacturing working in European international locations with reasonable to modest ranges of innovation.

Dr. Megi Mejdrechová

Dr. Megi Mejdrechová, Co-founder and CTO of RoboTwin, was acknowledged by EIT Manufacturing RIS for her position as a lady innovator in manufacturing.

RoboTwin additionally utilized for EIT Manufacturing’s Name for Proposals 2023, which helps revolutionary manufacturing-related tasks within the prototype stage, with the intention of launching merchandise to the market in a single 12 months.

“Yearly I spent engaged on our undertaking was extra thrilling than the earlier one. I consider that because of the varied technique of help from EIT Manufacturing, we now have all the things to maintain this pattern entering into 2023. The offered funding might give us an distinctive enhance to realize our targets and fulfill our dream – to carry RoboTwin to market and allow the automation of adverse, unhealthy, and repetitive jobs in manufacturing all around 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 ‘Data 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 providers and encourage the creation of worldwide aggressive and sustainable manufacturing.

EIT Manufacturing’s Co-Location Middle (CLC) East, based mostly in Vienna, is one in all six innovation hubs and providers seven international locations in Central and Jap Europe.

Are you a startup or enterprise involved in working or collaborating with RoboTwin? Attain out to the crew by connecting via Linkedin or instantly via the next emails:

  • data@robotwin.cz
  • megi.mejdrechova@robotwin.cz

 

 

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