- Zafira can perform safety precautions monitoring and sanitization at public place
- With bulk orders from Tamil Nadu and Kerala, the team is focussing on mass production
- Many risk-prone jobs will be supplanted by robots in future
The next time you step inside a mall for shopping, the girl in a saari at the entrance waiting for your safety check or the girl dressed in formal pantsuit roaming across floor for monitoring if you are following social distancing may take you by surprise. It may not be a girl at all! Yes, you read it right, it may be a humanoid robot in eye-catching human appearance.
After unveiling a range of Zafi Robots, (Zafi Go, Zafi Medic, Zafi Clean and Zafi Sanitizer) which were uniquely intended for the medical and sanitization purposes, Trichy based Propeller Technologies has shifted towards a new version of Humanoid Robot named ‘Zafira’ with more added intelligence, specially designed to ensure the protection of customers from COVID spread in various public places.
In a conversation with the Machine Maker, Mohamed Aashik Rahman, CEO of Propeller Technologies shared, “From the house of Zafi Robots we have developed a series of robots since the very beginning of COVID crisis for supporting various professions. Now, as the prevailing lockdown in various parts of the country has been gradually lifted to normalise economy, majority of the showrooms and shopping malls have started their operations. But still there is – or even higher – risk that the staff and the customers might get contaminated despite taking plenty of safety measures. Consequently, to ensure valuable customer safety we came up with Zafira”.
About Zafira
Zafira is a voice-activated robot, equipped with its own powerful computer which can detect whether the customer is following all the COVID precautions like wearing a mask, maintaining proper temperature and social distancing. It has outfitted features which enable it to automatically dispense hand sanitizers and it can be dressed up accordingly with any eye-catching outfit, which will further add magnificence to its physical appearance.
It begins functioning as soon as a client steps into the shop. It initially requests the client’s name and contact details and afterwards will check the body temperature multiple times. If in case the temperature detected is normal, it will cross-check if the person is wearing a mask and finally before letting the person in it will dispense hand sanitizer on the palms.
So far the outcome of demo conducted with the prototype at Chennai silks has been satisfactory and Rahman mentions that it has gained tremendous appreciation across the state. In fact, currently, the team is focussing on mass production since they have received orders in bulk from various showrooms of Tamil Nadu and Kerala. He added that team Zafi is additionally emphasizing on developing profoundly intelligent systems and envisages to become one of the organizations of pride for India in future.
Other Innovations
Apart from Zafira, the team is still multiplying the efficiency of medical robots and Rahman references that numerous developments are in progress, exclusively for the medical sector including ZAFI GO for doctors and nurses, ZAFICLEAN for cleaning employees, ZAFI SURVOYOR STRETCHER for the ambulance and departed soul burial employees, ZAFI STERLIZE for infected zones etc. “Adoption of robots are gradually spreading with individuals, earlier robots were utilised distinctly for industries but now in every house, we have some sort of robotic device installed. Furthermore, we foresee that very soon the extreme riskier jobs will be supplanted by robots which will become a good supporting system for humans,” says Rahman.
He mentioned that the team has already started working with MAUTO group of companies to develop driverless 3-wheels autos for Indian roads and currently, and is expecting to launch these vehicles within a very short span of time. Commenting on the difficulties confronted while following the roadmap towards success, Rahman stated, “Since we already had a well-developed team, we were not facing any difficulties in developing and introducing new robots but while getting into mass production, we faced various challenges such as on-time delivery, procurement of components, which generally became an obstruction due to market demand and lockdown”. However, rising against every odd, currently, the team is successfully pioneering Made in India Robots.