Cosine Robots: Bengaluru Startup On A Mission To Build Affordable Humanoid Robots That'll Help Out In Indian Factories, Homes

One fond childhood memory for kids growing up in the last century was watching the animated sitcom The Jetsons, where robotic hands for household chores were always abundant. It may have even sparked the fantasy in more than a few to have robots helping around the home one day.

While robots — even those that look like humans, called ‘humanoid robots’ — were certainly around back then, they tended to be more of an experimental nature, where scientists and engineers were more concerned with tweaking a part here, a part there in order to simply identify and extend fundamental robotic capabilities.

As time passed, robots grew more and more advanced, yet largely remained limited to an academic, scientific, or defence setting. However, key advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) over the last decade have promised to propel robots from experiments to helping hands, whether at a factory, a service or a retail outlet, or, as that childhood fantasy goes, in homes.

Companies like Boston Dynamics, Tesla, Agility Robotics, Softbank Robotics, and Hanson Robotics are swiftly helping materialise and hopefully soon commercialise miraculously useful humanoid robots. Tesla’s suite of humanoid robot “friends,” showcased on 11 October 2024, provides a taste of things to come.

Here in India, in the thriving tech city of Bengaluru, Karnataka, a two-member startup operating out of the co-founder’s apartment is working hard to move the robotics dial forward by designing and developing humanoid robots in India.

While the global robotics giants boast of ever-improving, advanced robots that look surprisingly human and are capable of handling a variety of mundane tasks, the key differentiator with the Bengaluru initiative is set to be the price point.

Whereas the market rate for humanoid robots presently is anywhere between $10,000 for the basic machines and around $100,000 for the top-of-the-line ones, the Bengaluru company that goes by the name of ‘Cosine Robots’ is targeting a $4,000 price point for their humanoid robot.

The company has started piecing together the individual systems, starting with the actuators, to quickly commercialise them and use the resulting profits to build the rest of the parts until they all eventually add up to a full-fledged humanoid robot.

For Cosine Robots co-founder Kiran Mathew Koshy, whose home doubles up as the office, building affordable humanoid robots is not just a personal business goal. He believes India must get a move on and develop robots that the Indian public can afford, lest the prices elsewhere make these next-generation robots largely inaccessible to the Indian market.

“Even if we are not successful, someone will eventually succeed in building these robots at an affordable price. However, that price may not be affordable in India, even though it might be in the United States, Europe, or elsewhere,” he explains, adding, “It is crucial that we avoid this situation as a country by developing robots that are affordable for Indian industries, made in India, and deployable here.”

The Come Up

Koshy has done his professional time, accumulating close to a decade of experience working at multinational giants Amazon and Google. His work in these companies was standard software engineering fare, but he harboured the idea of starting up someday.

“I've always wanted to do a startup, right from my college days, but I come from a very middle-class family, so that was not something I could jump into right away. Getting a job and getting a couple of promotions in the job was a natural progression,” he says.

The time was right in mid-2023. The Covid-19 pandemic had passed. Enough professional experience had been gained. It was time to dust off those old startup dreams. Koshy had maintained a longstanding interest in robotics, but he was smart to notice that recent advancements in AI had changed the game. While building humanoid robots was no longer the dominant challenge, getting them to do stuff without having to program their every move remained a problem. Luckily, AI opened a pathway.

In the pre-AI-infused robotics world, “you would use robotics only in a place where you have extreme levels of scale, where you can write the code once and then deploy it to, let's say, 10,000 robots at least,” Koshy says. “The only realistic use cases of robots were in things like the Amazon warehouse. And those are also not robotic arms or anything. Those are more like wheeled robots, which carry entire shelves so that the picking and packing is more convenient.”

However, with advancements in AI, the need to hard-code the robot’s every move is fulfilled by AI’s ingenuity. So, AI can operate the robot and get useful work out of it.

The AI advances that have propelled robotics development include the transformer-based architectures underlying large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, vision transformers, and the technology driving self-driving cars. They have enabled robots to be given instructions via text or speech, through which they scope out the area and the objects contained therein, and then proceed to execute tasks, like moving a glass of water from one place to another.

Buoyed by these advances, the focus has shifted to making robots more accessible—specifically, by constructing them simply, swiftly, and at scale to enhance affordability. This is the mission Koshy and his co-founder Delip Thomas, a year senior to Koshy during their Bachelor of Technology studies at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Patna, have undertaken.

Building From Scratch

Building a humanoid robot, broadly speaking, requires several systems, chief among which are the actuators, sensors, and AI and software.

“We’re taking a ground-up approach where we build the hardware first, then add a vision stack that can recognise objects. After that, we will have an AI stack to execute actions based on instructions,” Koshy says.

He and his colleague are starting off with the design and development of actuators. Actuators are essential because they enable robots to move. They convert energy into physical motion, enabling robots to walk, pick up objects, and make gestures.

“You can think of an actuator as a single joint of the robot. We will soon start selling these actuators, and use the profits to finance building more robots,” Koshy says.

Building actuators first is a good strategy because those currently on the market are expensive. A robot maker needs as many actuators as joints designed for the robot. This bumps up the overall cost of the robot. Cosine is, therefore, planning to make cheaper actuators, which will help them lower the cost of their eventual robot offerings.

“A single joint actuator on the market today would be around $1,000 plus. I'm talking about precise ones that you would use in industrial arms. We are building ours to be priced between $300 and $400,” Koshy says.

The joints of a robot must be interconnected, which brings us to the static components that connect the actuators. Again, with affordability in mind, Koshy and his colleague plan to employ mass-manufacturing techniques like casting and sheet metal bending and cutting to make the static components, borrowing from the ways of automobile manufacturing, where affordable and scale-friendly methodologies are used.

“In a car, you have several components which have a very high level of precision, like the engine, crankshaft, or, in an electric car, the motor. Everything else, like the body and chassis, just has to be strong; they don't have to be very precise. It's the precision that raises the cost. The components that need to be precise need to be manufactured using machining or milling, whereas sheet metal operations and stamping, for example, are a lot cheaper and faster,” he says.

Similarly, while building robots, the components demanding precision can be machined, whereas the other parts, like the static components, can be made relatively quickly and affordably, like in car manufacturing.

Koshy has gone about designing their actuators in such a way that they could be made on the standard automotive original equipment manufacturer (OEM) platforms. “Say, someone who builds pistons for a Maruti Suzuki engine would be able to build actuators for this, except the controller,” he says.

Actuators aside, the Bengaluru-based robot makers will also need sensors, along with AI and software. 

Koshy plans to use the standard Hall effect sensors procured off the shelf. A Hall effect sensor measures the strength and direction of a magnetic field. In the automotive industry, it is used in wheel speed sensors (ABS systems), camshaft or crankshaft position sensors, and throttle position sensors.

A more familiar application would be using the sensor to detect the opening and closing of flip cases on our smartphones or laptop lids by sensing embedded magnets.

As for the AI stack, Cosine Robots plans to opt for existing off-the-shelf or open-source LLMs. They recognise the need to build AI models of their own at some point, but that’s for later. For now, the focus is on getting their self-made actuators off the ground.

Among other things, the ‘actuator first’ strategy will enable the bootstrapped initiative to generate initial revenue, allowing them to pursue funding to gradually enhance their robot offerings.

The startup’s earlier attempts to woo investors came to nought. “Deep tech investors have had their hands burnt by a lot of robotics startups. Also, there aren’t really that many deep tech investors in India to begin with. There are some, but they have a policy of not funding until there is some level of revenue, which is hard to get in deep tech before you build a product — where significant risk capital is needed first. This creates a gap in the VC (venture capital or capitalists) market in India.”

Therefore, Koshy plans to generate revenue by selling actuators first. This will allow him to deploy capital the way he sees fit. “At that point, if we get investors, that will be even better. But we are not entering a path where we need to have VCs deploy capital before we can do the work,” he says.

The good news is that there are takers for Cosine’s actuators already. “We have a couple of pre-orders from people looking to use our actuators. We will start selling them as quickly as we can, probably in the next month.”

Building Robots That People Can Buy

Cosine is not out to make the most advanced robots. Rather, they are in the business of making robots that most people can buy.

Explaining the current state of robotics, Koshy states, “We are not in a phase where the bottleneck is in creating something that doesn’t exist. Instead, we are at a stage where many of these technologies have been developed by various people historically, some even 20 or 30 years ago. However, they are produced at such a low scale and volume today that the per-unit costs are astronomically high. Everyone is racing to reduce this price as much as possible while remaining profitable.”

The pursuit of affordable humanoid robots ties into Koshy’s dream of a world, particularly India, where luxuries typically affordable only to the well-off, such as hiring a housekeeper, cook, or driver to make life easier, become accessible to nearly anyone.

“It doesn't matter how rich the entire world becomes, but, in our current state of technology, someone in the bottom 50 per cent is never going to have a cook or a maid. Whereas in a world with, let's say, 10 billion robots, this is very trivial. Everyone can then have a robotic cook or a robotic maid to clean up the apartment, and maybe robotic security so that women are safe.”

According to Koshy, a society with affordable robots will be as different from one without them as society was before and after the Industrial Revolution. “Imagine a world where you can do construction with robots. You can easily provide five-bedroom apartments for everyone. A lot of the things that are wrong in society are primarily because we don’t have infrastructure. We don't have good roads; we don't have good houses for everyone. These are very simple labour problems which immediately go away once you have affordable robots.”

Cosine Robots have begun this journey. They have built a prototype humanoid robot — think of it as Version 1 — that was put together using off-the-shelf motors. The more capable, the more indigenous Version 2 will incorporate its own actuators.

Once the robot is ready for the market, the company will initially target industrial settings. This environment will provide controlled real-world experience before the robots are deployed in homes.

“In the industry, the person using the robot has full control of the setting and where it is used, so they can easily have a walled-off area where the robot operates, and no one in their right mind will walk into that area. However, in a home environment, you can't really do that if you have pets or your kids running around,” Koshy explains.

The home version of the robot will simply be the industry version with additional safety features built into it. “Safety controls would be things like contact sensors, which can detect skin touch on the robot the same way a capacitor screen on your phone can detect a skin touch. Similarly, you can have similar sensors around the robot’s body so that it stops whenever a human touches it. Everything required for home safety is industrial plus some safety stuff,” he says.

Sociopolitical Implications

Any talk of introducing robots in greater numbers in society typically accompanies some nervousness. The resulting job losses are perhaps the most prominent concern. According to Koshy, though some jobs would be lost, especially those that “involve pressing some buttons,” new opportunities will open up in a society that welcomes humanoid robots. 

“When we started introducing computers, there were a lot of people who started protesting because they feared the loss of jobs. But the reality is, in India, computers enabled us to do a lot of work and generate a lot of income as a country, primarily by providing service work to other nations,” he says.

Koshy argues that a similar scenario could unfold in India's robotics sector. “If you have a robot in the United States (US) and you have someone in India who can control that robot, there is quite a lot of work which you can do remotely, even without AI, even without any automation, by simply doing manual control.” So, through remote robot control, someone in India could help run an American factory at night.

Moreover, robotics and especially AI will shake things up in ways we can’t quite grasp just yet. With such an unwritten future ahead of us, where chapters are waiting to be written, India can’t afford to hang back and wait for other authors to do the writing.

“I would give an example of what happened to the Arab nations after the printing press was introduced. The Arab nations banned the printing press because they wanted to save the jobs of the royal scribes. What happened as a result of the printing press was a massive increase in living standards in the West, whereas the living standards in most of Asia pretty much remained the same,” Koshy says.

“In the long term, things are 100 per cent going to be better. In the short term, will we have turmoil as a result? Yes. Do we need to adjust as a society? Yes,” he adds.

As is often the case, governments will have to play a key role. “The best way to tackle it is to ease the pain of people whose jobs are getting displaced without entering full-fledged socialism. So, you still need capitalism, but you can reduce capitalism from all segments to some segments.”

Drawing a distinction between the paths taken by Europe and Russia on one hand and the US on the other after the Industrial Revolution, Koshy says, “There was also a very high increase in productivity compared to what was there earlier. In Russia, they decided, ‘Hey, we have reached peak productivity. Let’s just distribute the gains and enter into socialism.’ The problem with that approach is that it effectively caps your growth, resulting in further productivity at a very low rate once you enter socialism.”

Koshy’s view is that a mixed economy where socialist elements are added on top of a capitalist system would be the way to go. It will retain the incentive to pursue further increases in productivity while providing a safety net for those in need of protection. The introduction of the Social Security Act in the US in the 1930s serves as an example of this approach, in contrast to the paths taken by Europe and Russia after the Industrial Revolution.

Koshy believes that in the age of robotics and AI, governments can harness technology to ensure that even if someone is without a job, they are not without food to eat or a place to live. Widespread use of robotics can make that happen.