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Robot hammers home a point in India

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a great advocate of the Make in India campaign. At least one company, a Tata power plant, based in Mudra in Ahmedabad, has benefited from the initiative. The plant generates 800 Mega Watt power.

Recently, power generation at the plant came to halt after a hammer accidentally fell into a high-pressure steam pipe. But the retrieval of the hammer posed a problem, because the pressure could not be controlled, and the location of the hammer too was not clear. The hammer weighed around 2kg and it was dropped during a maintenance check.

Said a plant official: "The normal procedure would be to locate where the hammer was stuck in the pipe. We would have had to cut the three inch thick pipe, retrieve the hammer, weld the pipes, get technical clearance from our monitoring authorities. The whole process would have resulted in a loss of around Rs50 million."

The power plant trouble shooters contacted Gridbot. Gridbot Technologies is a start-up specialising in Robotics, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Vision, based in Ahmedabad. It is a rather small company as companies go, with a turn over of around Rs20 million. Pulkit Gaur and Govind Godedara who run the firm rose to the challenge. They decided to send a robot down the pipe.

The hammer was lodged 15 metres inside the pipe. Gridbot's Chief Technical Officer, Pulkit, and Head of Design and Manufacturing Division, Govind, arrived at the plant early Friday morning, last week.

When they reached the plant they saw the robot they had brought along with them would need further changes. "We realised a serious modification was required in the robot's gripper to pull out the hammer from a depth of 15 meteres. What made the work difficult was the 90 degree curvature of the pipeline," Pulkit said.

They could easily locate the hammer. "But because of the 90 degree curvature, it was difficult for the robot to retrieve the hammer without losing its grip. We applied maximum pressure to the gripper (equivalent to 250 kg) to ensure that the hammer didn't slip."

The operation took three hours as opposed to seven days it would have taken had the engineers at the plant shut it down and followed the usual procedure.

Gridbot Technologies is a start-up that was incubated in IIM Ahmedabad. Pulkit Gaur, has a degree in Bachelors in Engineering from Jodhpur University and established the company with his childhood friend Govind who is a Commerce graduate from the same university.

The operation cost the plant around Rs1.6 million. The expenditure would gone up to Rs50 million, had the engineers at the plant decided to retrieve the hammer by cutting the pipe.

The Make in India FDI inflow netted in last two years $77 billion. Gridbot and their robots seem to be in a good position to get some of that money.

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