Robotics company benefits from ARU’s COVID-19 Business Recovery programme
Robotics company benefit from ARU's COVID-19 Business Recovery Programme
The Company
Antobot is a robotics start-up and one of our Arise Chelmsford occupants. After hearing about our innovation hub offering from a local council newsletter, the company joined the Arise community in November 2020. It was at this point that founder and CEO Howard Wu was introduced to our range of innovation and business support.
Challenge
COVID-19 and the travel restrictions that come with it has created a drastic labour shortage within farming and the agricultural industry at large. Antobot recognised that they could help solve this issue as they were developing commercial grade universal Robot Control Units (uRCU) with a focus on agricultural robotic applications.
Solution:
The business needed to employ two Control Systems Engineer Analysts who could work on the project and found our COVID-19 Business Recovery internship programme to be hugely beneficial.
"This is a wonderful internship scheme. It is extremely helpful for both the graduates and our business. The recruitment process is very straightforward, the friendly and very experienced staff Suneet and Laura are especially helpful – candidates and interviews were recommended and arranged so smoothly, and the interns were a great fit to the team"
Howard Wu - CEO
The Analysts gained exposure to state-of-the-art robotics technology, controls and machine vision. They helped to solve challenging technical issues, developing concepts and prototyping hardware (e.g. for a new mobile robot platform) and testing prototypes.
The Impact:
Howard has seen the immediate impact of the initiative upon his business,
"Both the interns and our employees enjoyed the journey thoroughly and one of the interns has now joined us permanently. I hope you can keep this scheme running for longer to benefit more graduates and businesses. We 100% recommend this scheme to all other businesses – it is truly great!”
Antobot are now investigating the possibility of partaking in our live briefs programme, an opportunity to present our students with a real-world problem and challenge them to come up with a fresh and creative idea that will benefit the business in the future.
Antobot are just one example of how Arise Innovation Hubs and Anglia Ruskin University are supporting business recovery.