Do you want to start a business and profit from the fast growing global robotics trend? If YES, here are 50 best business ideas in the robotics industry.
Sometimes, the future seems so far away. Twenty five years ago, we all assumed that by now we’d be jetting around flying cars and being taken care of by robot maids, like the Jetsons. Alas, our expectations of the future were too optimistic.
Finally, though, we’re almost there and the forward thinking entrepreneur can look forward to day, in less than a decade, when he’ll be able to make money with robots.
Why Start a Business in the Robotics Industry?
Robotics that can take over everyday tasks or be smart enough to look and behave like a human android utilizing AI are still years away from reality.
Exempting a few exceptions, robotics has a long way to go to progress into meaningful cyborgs that can either take over humans in a savage robotic war like Terminator or completely replace human jobs with thousands of times more productivity.
However, if one really looks around, robots have indeed taken over in one way or the other. From the voice assistant in our phone, assembly line manufacturing, smarter kitchen applications and even predicative ads, robots are adapting and evolving.
More visually appealing forms of robots in humanoid forms will get a lot of attention and is already starting to power economies like South Korea and China. In india too, entrepreneurs are staring to tap into the largely ignored market of robotics for future use in defense, healthcare, education and private assistance.
The industry remains largely untapped except the monopolies of a few who are also backed by foreign giants in most cases, which should inspire entrepreneurs to take a dive in the pool of options available. For entrepreneurs and businesses alike, the surest way to enter into unknown territories is to understand competitions.
Best Robotics Business ideas
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Dog Walking
Too busy to take dogs out for a walk or are you into the business of dog walking? You can beat your competitors by leasing out robots that help with dog walking. It will make you rich and also give you a corporate identity.
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Aquariums
The sight of fish swimming in an indoor environment is both therapeutic and beautiful. Unfortunately, someone has to clean that aquarium. Robotic fishes are the answer. They can provide all of the benefits without any of the effort required of flesh-and-blood fish.
Plus, your little brother will never overfeed them and leave you to find all your fish floating upside down. Selling robotic aquarium is the way to go.
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Courtroom Sketch Artist
Most courts in the united states don’t allow cameras into the courtroom because their presence can be a major distraction in the small enclosed space.
However, sketch artists are usually allowed entry. Working in pencil, pastels and charcoal, they can provide illustrations to go along with the newspaper accounts of the trial. In the near future, robots might completely replace this occupation.
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Bar
Let’s face it, it takes a special kind of person to work in a bar all day and all night. Not only do you have to deal with the peanut shells and everyone telling you their problems, but mixing drinks is hard work. The difference between profitability and not, could be as little as a few millilitres of booze. Robotic bartenders will never have to remake a drink because it was too weak.
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Pack Animals
Mules are dirty, hairy animals that require food, water and rest. Other than fuel and occasional maintenance, robotic pack animals have no such requirements. As more and more average people attempt to conquer mountain summits like Everest and K2, the demand for these mechanical donkeys will grow.
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Professional Athletes
Too often, professional athletes are looked upon as role models in our society. Unfortunately, they’re foibles and million dollar lifestyles make them poorly suited for this secondary role. Robotic athletes will entertain us with their amazing skills and give us the opportunity to look to others for inspiration in fashion and behaviour.
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Musical studio
Much like professional athletes, musicians and entertainers should be seen and heard only when performing. The rest of the time, we should ignore them. This will be easier with robotic musicians. They can be locked in the closet after a performance.
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Massage parlour or Spa
Massage is big business, but requires a lot of hands to work. For the therapist who doesn’t actually want to touch anyone, massaging robots could be just the thing.
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Furniture Repair and carpentry
Today, when one of our kitchen chairs break, we might toss it into the garbage. In the future, though, robotic furniture will reassemble itself after a catastrophic collapse.
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Newspaper Delivery
The paperboy on a bicycle tossing newspapers onto porches has mostly been replaced by adults driving cars. While it might be safer, their delivery isn’t as exact. Soon, we would step away from the bicycle riding tot to the paperboy-bot.
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Security Contractors
The Pentagon plans to spend nearly $2 billion over the next five years on robots ranging in size from a multi-ton minesweeper to tiny devices now used by Special Forces. Some of that technology is definitely going to be utilized by companies like Blackwater. Think of saving labour costs!
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Robotic cars
We live in an era of self-driving cars, robotic vacuum cleaners and ever more autonomous military drones. That’s because innovation comes relatively quickly and cheaply nowadays.
Let’s assume you wanted to build a robot 20 years ago, you would need to invest several million dollars to build one robot, and it might take three years. Costs and timescales like that just don’t fly for modern entrepreneurs who are accustomed to putting their money in software.
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Smartphones production and selling
The biggest improvements in robotics have come from companies outside the field. Right now because of smartphones, the price of components [useful for robots] is 1% what it was. Most of the components in smartphones are same ones you need in robots—sensors, cameras, batteries, processors. The biggest difference between now and 20 years ago is that the components have become cheap.
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Robot operating system
So much of the basic infrastructure of an app or web service has already been built and is available for free or at a low cost (from hosting on Amazon to the collaborative software development at the Apache web server). Launching startups is now more about ideas than the technology itself.
The same thing is happening in hardware, as basic components (like the open-source microprocessors Arduino and Raspberry Pi) and libraries of code (like the Robot Operating System) are beginning to reach millions of hobbyists and professionals.
It’s very important that you have a lot of blocks to easily combine, and you don’t spend too much time to build any of them from scratch. You can make a business out of code writing.
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Building prototypes
In the past, prototyping was really hard. Hardware companies would build a prototype, show it off, then spend another year or two creating the next prototype. But now, because of 3D printers and good 3D software, you can do prototyping much quicker.
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Hardware business
In software, it’s easy for a handful of engineers to build something with massive reach (just look at Instagram which had but 16 employees when it sold to Facebook for $1 billion).
Thanks to better components and easier prototyping, we are now seeing teams consisting of just a handful of engineers launching successful robotics start-ups. Wielding irons or components together is a job for an individual and one that will take over in years to come.
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Accelerators for hardware and robotics companies
Presently, there are hundreds if not thousands of incubators and accelerators designed to help launch software start-ups, but only a handful aimed at hardware start-ups. The first, HAXLR8R, was launched in 2012.
Since then, others have followed, including Highway1 in San Francisco and the R/GA Connected Devices Accelerator. Even big companies like Nike and Foxconn are launching hardware accelerators. Two accelerators that focus specifically on robotics are AlphaLab Gear and Grishin’s own Bolt.
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Consulting
The robots that we already rely on—automatic doors, cash machines, even the Roomba vacuum cleaner—are good at what they do precisely because the task they are designed for is relatively straightforward. This is the key to turning robots into a real business.
But many have started to build complicated universal robots. I think Japanese companies are heroes at this; they just build a mass of technology. But there’s no real way to use that in real life. As a zealous entrepreneur you can start a firm that sees things from a different perspective for your clients.
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Importation
It’s not just prototyping that has become easier for hardware start-ups—it’s also possible to manufacture small run of goods quickly and cheaply in China in a way that simply wasn’t possible 10 or 20 years ago. You can import robotics hardware or robots and sell, making huge profits along the line.
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Data sharing
Plenty of smart things have been said about how cloud computing can grant robots access to huge amounts of computing power.
This is good for accomplishing difficult tasks like processing what a robot is “seeing” without having to put all that computing power into the robot itself. But there are other notions about how cloud computing could make robots better.
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Robot control app
It used to be that every gadget in our lives needed its own control panel and user interface. But as these devices become internet-connected, it makes more sense to simply control them through our smartphones—a system that most fitness monitors and other wearable technologies rely upon.
Plus, it saves manufacturers from having to build this functionality into the device itself. This saves “a big part of the cost” of robots. But cloud robotics isn’t limited to Smartphone robots. It could apply to any kind of robot, large or small, humanoid or not.
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Business investment
The simple fact is that hardware, which must contend with the unpredictable physical world, is much more of a challenge than software, which operates in the knowable environment of a computer.
So it’s possible that, just as cell phones have laid the groundwork for some aspects of the imminent robot takeover, innovation in electric cars could bring us even closer to the point where there are few jobs left for humans to do. From my own view of the robotic industry, it is gingering up to take over the world and investing into it can be all a rich fellow needs.
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Robot shop
Starting a robot shop that sells little robot toys for kids is a lucrative business. By stocking toy cars, toy phones, robot trucks, carts etc parents will always want to make their kids happy and it would also help the kids get advanced. A robot shop in a well suited location will be a lucrative business.
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Hospital robotics
Robotics are now very common in hospitals in Italy; Nao humanoid robots which was created by the French firm Aldebaran Robotics. They rely on a cloud infrastructure to perform speech recognition, face detection, and other tasks that might help improve their interaction with patients.
Probably the most widely known medical robot is the da Vinci® Surgical System made by Intuitive Surgical. The tele operated robot-assisted surgical system has been used successfully on millions of patients since it was cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2000. Indications for use include minimally invasive thoracoscopic, cardiac, urological and gynaecologic procedures.
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Distribution and supply
Coupling robotics and distributed computing could bring about big changes in robot autonomy. We are not surprised to see Google, which develops core cloud technologies and services, pushing the idea of cloud robotics. But it has been noted that the cloud is not the solution to all of robotics’ difficulties.
In particular, controlling a robot’s motion—which relies heavily on sensors and feedback—won’t benefit much from the cloud. Tasks that involve real-time execution require on board processing. You could start a business that sells and distribute cloud robotics to companies and individuals.
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Robotic engineer
Like it or not, your new robotics engineer business is going nowhere fast without a business plan. Learning how to draft a robotics engineering company business plan isn’t difficult. Business plans are entrepreneurial roadmaps that identify destinations for growth and the routes your robotics engineers business will take to reach them.
Once your business plan is in place, you can use it for a variety of funding and planning functions. Many experts advise against starting a robotics engineers business if you can buy an established operation. Yet the process of buying a robotics engineers business introduces a new set of challenges. There are no reliable shortcuts in buying a business.
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Personal teacher
We are at a turning point in the Education history. The online education is exploding, and the traditional education system will have to update itself very soon.
I’m dreaming of a personal teacher, a physical tool that you can carry with you everywhere, that will learn about you and your best learning method (everybody is not equal, some will learn better by listening, other by reading, etc.), and then offer you the best learning program ever.
Every “teacher” would be connected to a cloud, and they would be able to share information between them, which will allow us to find relevant partners for the learners, people wanting to learn the same things and living relatively close from each other.
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Car parking system
Industrial Automation/consumer electronics companies make huge money with simple machine designs. You can create a product that has the potential to kick start a company like a well managed, time and space effective car parking robot (FPGA based), FPGA Based Electrostatic Precipitator and Rapper Controller, Health Care devices, Intelligent industrial Weaving machine, etc.
An expert from Management or engineering is desirable. The car parking systems are manufactured by very few companies across the globe. If funded by VCs, it has the potential to make millions.
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Automated home cleaning robot
There already are special automatic robots for vacuum cleaning or cutting grass. But how about a universal one that could do all of it depending on what accessories you put on it. It can even water the grass or help to sweep the playground if needed.
It could work like tractor – one single device that has many usages depending on what you plug to it. There could be a good business with their accessories too.
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Trash sorting robot
Piles of trash, especially from public places don’t get sorted because it’s quite expensive to collect separated trash from every park. What if there was a robot that could sort the trash automatically after it is collected.
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Robotic girlfriend
Your girlfriend or wife wants to go on a vacation, wants a break from you, or she simply doesn’t want to be with you. You can get a robot girlfriend who looks, feels, and acts like your real girlfriend or wife, yet allows your real girlfriend or wife to take a break or vacation from you.
The challenge with relationships is that sometimes your girlfriend or wife doesn’t always want to be with you. So, how about a company that builds a real robot that learns from your real girlfriend or wife, resembles her, yet doesn’t make your girlfriend or wife jealous when you’re with her.
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Robot cafeteria
Cafeteria where there aren’t any workers. Everything would be atomized. Paying could be done with phone, credit card on coin machine. Only human contact would be screen where an employee could answer to customer’s questions via web.
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Robonet
RoboNet can be a safe, creative and helpful international network of robots where Robots can communicate together to share information, knowledge, opinion, software and physical resources. Robots can work together to serve human beings better with limited resources.
Robots can find new solutions to their problems, so they can serve human beings better. Robots are restricted from doing anything that can harm humans and their future.
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Robo-human
Responds with correct answer to users’ question (voice). They use search engines after intelligently filtering the environment provided by the user like address, likes, dislikes, example scenarios and decisions taken by user.
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Touch screen
Make the small and low-cost robots for touching screen of ios, android, and any kind of capacitive touch screen. They use automation test like human, remote mobile and play games on iOS device remotely
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Smart camera
Today we are using camera to capture various sweet moments. But most of us are untrained to capture accurate (best) position of a movement. This is where the smart camera comes in. Smart cameras can help us capture accurate and sharp images at all times.
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Virtual robot for social communication
In this developed world, technology is supposed to help people have closer connections and make life more convenient, but on the flip-side, it also makes people isolated and prone to social anxiety. What if there is some kind of virtual machine or robot, that can help people get closer without travelling?
Not only would it help to bring people closer in the first step, but also can act as teleporting so you can have simulated feelings to communicate with people. The biggest advantage is time saving from travelling/commute, thus we can be more productive and have more time to chase our dreams.
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Robot business talk
Connecting phones of two different persons with voice mode just like humans. Mobile of client talks with mobile of employee to provide details. In this the data is provided to the mobile by client. Mobile of employee talks with clients accordingly.
Search and open source content of internet are utilized intelligently among phones. This reduces human effort and provides fast decisions. Client can take decisions based on the mobile data. BI, Data Analytics can be included in R&D.
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Robotic process automation for finance institutions
The push to go increasingly digital and do more with available resources has intensified the need for companies to empower their workers through technology.
RPA is at the forefront of human-computer technology and provides players in the financial services industry with a virtual workforce that is rule based and is set up to connect with your company’s systems in the same way as your existing users. With robotics, you automate and build an automation platform for you front office, back office and support functions.
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Diagnostic centre
In medicine and robotics, diagnostic robots are diagnosis tools in the form of a physical robot or a software expert system.
Developed in the 1970s near the height of the AI boom, automatic diagnosis systems are capable of gathering data for medical diagnosis with its knowledge based subsystem, and tools such as a tendon-actuated, anthropomorphic finger, skin-like sensors for tactile perception, etc.
In February 2013, IBM announced that Watson software system’s first commercial application would be for utilization management decisions in lung cancer treatment at Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Centre in conjunction with health insurance company WellPoint.
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Healthcare and hospitals
Physicians, nurses and technicians are the superheroes of healthcare. But even Captain Marvel needs a trusted sidekick. Enter the robots. They augment the surgeon’s potential with superhuman precision and repeatability. They help hospitals save costs, reduce waste, and improve patient care.
They offer levels of measurability and traceability that only automated machines can achieve. And they provide medical technology developers with proven platforms for new innovations.
From radiation treatment to eye surgery, rehabilitation to hair transplantation, and robot therapists to robotic pharmacists, and even a robot phlebotomist, healthcare robots are transforming the fields of medicine across the globe. Robots aren’t new to healthcare.
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Assembling plant
When it comes to applying robotic technology to new product designs, the household appliance industry has been quite innovative. Robo vacuums are a great example. Robots are also available for applications ranging from floor washing to gutter cleaning and grass cutting to pool cleaning.
At the recent Hannover Fair in Germany, a kitchen equipped with two robotic arms attracted a lot of attention. The device can cook a wide variety of meals—cleaning the dishes afterwards is another story. And, earlier this year, engineers at the United Technologies Research Centre and the University of California at Berkeley demonstrated a robot that can wash clothes.
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Agriculture
Agriculture is humankind’s oldest and still its most important economic activity that provides food, feed, fibre, and fuel necessary for our survival. With the global population expected to reach 9 billion by 2050, agricultural production must double if it is to meet the increasing demands for food and bio energy.
Given limited land, water and labour resources, it is estimated that the efficiency of agricultural productivity must increase by 25% to meet that goal, while limiting the growing pressure that agriculture puts on the environment. Robotics and automation can play a significant role in society meeting 2050 agricultural production needs.
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Construction company
Maturing quickly, these nascent construction tools are taking their first baby steps in the direction of building sites worldwide. A bit of consolidation among the varying groups and their technologies, which presently seem more than a bit remote, could certainly hasten a new era of construction.
An era that stamps a whole new look to traditional industry bugaboos like frequent cost overruns and low rates of productivity. The benefits are just too startlingly good to ignore:
Radically reducing construction costs, Increasing construction speed, Little to no building-site construction waste, Reducing financing costs for builders because the product is ready for the market much quicker, Easier and safer work for construction workers, Lower insurance costs for builders, and Increased sustainability over a building’s lifetime.
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Architecture
Robots fascinate us. Their ability to move and act autonomously is visually and intellectually seductive. We write about them, put them in movies, and watch them elevate menial tasks like turning a doorknob into an act of technological genius.
For years, they have been employed by industrial manufacturers, but until recently, never quite considered seriously by architects.
Sure, some architects might have let their imaginations wander, like Archigram did for their “Walking City”, but not many thought to actually make architecture with robots. Now, in our age of digitization, virtualization, and automation, the relationship between architects and robots seems to be blooming.
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Surveying
Surveying has been around for a very long time. It is known as the second oldest profession and men have been practicing it since early 3000 BC.
It was used in ancient Egypt when they built the pyramids, and was used by the Roman Empire to establish tax registers of conquered lands. Surveying requires a skill in mathematics and was one of the first professions to be licensed. Shades of Asimov, they are among us.
The robots are here. Now they are surveying the land, no, this is not fiction, but real. Robots are joining the work force in even greater numbers. They were mostly used in factories, but now they are mapping, or rather, surveying the great outdoors for us.
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Shopping mall
Small self-driving robots which can deliver shopping and groceries to the door, will begin trundling through the streets of London soon.
The six-wheeled robot has been created by the co-founders of Skype under a new company called Starship. Its creators claim it will able to deliver two bags of shopping, weighing around 9kg, on short trips within half an hour of an order being placed.
Star ship CEO AhtiHeinla said the delivery vehicles could operate 99 percent autonomously, with prototypes already undergoing testing. A pilot service should go live in Greenwich, London next year. Other pilot schemes will take place in the US and then the robots may be used in other countries, if they are successful.
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Factory business
Robot factory workers aren’t without their limitations. In their simplest forms, industrial robots are mere automatons. Humans program them to perform a simple task, and they repeat that task over and over again. Tasks that require decision-making, creativity, adaptation and on-the-job learning tend to go to the humans.
But when a job’s just right for a robot, productivity tends to increase dramatically. For instance, Australia’s Drake Trailers installed a single welding robot on its production line and benefited from a reported 60 percent increase in productivity [source: ABB Australia].
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Computer manufacturing and selling
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a general term that implies the use of a computer to model and/or replicate intelligent behaviour. Research in AI focuses on the development and analysis of algorithms that learn and/or perform intelligent behaviour with minimal human intervention.
These techniques have been applied to a broad range of problems that arise in robotics, e-commerce, medical diagnosis, gaming, mathematics, military planning and logistics, to name a few.
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Painting
Some may be seduced by their graceful, delicate movements, but don’t be fooled, industrial paint robots are relentless perfectionists, control freaks if you will, that are bound and determined to shine above the rest.
These industrial workhorses produce virtually flawless paint finishes with superhuman consistency throughout. Like a Jedi knight, they slash operating cost and material waste. They’re fearless in the face of hazardous VOCs, combustible paint fumes and other environmental foes. Robotic painting is as much an art as it is science.