Inventor & Entrepreneur

Manoj Sahi Kumar is a subject matter specialist in Technology Innovation, Design Thinking and Venture Management. He has been a serial entrepreneur in the APAC and EMEA regions, creating new ventures Mattr5, Elbots, and Robots Alive, in addition to serving as an independent senior advisor to startups and MNCs.

He holds a Bachelor’s Degree with Distinction in Mechatronics (Robotics), Double Master’s Degrees with Distinction in Innovation Design Engineering from Imperial College London and the Royal College of Art, United Kingdom. He is also a researcher at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.

Inventing the future

The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented. It was man’s ability to invent that made human society what it is. The mental processes behind inventions are still mysterious.

The first step of the inventor is to visualize, by an act of imagination, a thing or a state of things that does not yet exist but appears in some way desirable.

The inventor can then start rationally arguing backwards from the invention and forward from the means at disposal, until a way is found from one to the other.

Mattrbot

Robotic Soft Material

Imagine a future where “material is a robot”. Materials that can sense, actuate, compute, and communicate. Mattrbot is an initiative using AI and design thinking to create the materials for autonomous systems of the future

Liwa

Watch that Breathes

A levitating watch that shares the user’s breath with others and gives a sense of human bonding through non-verbal communication when placed on the wrist, but when not on the wrist, it creates a self-bond with the user itself

Space Compass

Navigating to Planets

An artifact navigation compass that is free from the influence of gravity as it points towards the planetary positions in the solar system and creates intriguing interactions with the space travelers

Boston Dynamics

Evaluating RL on Atlas

A framework that benchmarks the latest reinforcement learning algorithms, Hindsight Experience Replay (HER), and Deep Q Network (DQN), on a simulated Atlas robot from Boston Dynamics

CarriRo

Logistics Robot Cart

A logistics support robot with autonomous driving function and “user following” capabilities by switching between various modes of “Assist-Tracking-Autonomous” during operations, from semi-autonomous to autonomous

Sensoids

Sensing a Human

An early-stage non-contact human sensing system for detecting the presence and identity of a human indoors and outdoors irrespective of light conditions with the aim to incorporate it in intelligent ambiance and robotic platforms

Dynawear

Wearable Robots

A collection of smart wearables that utilize wearable sensors along with mechanical parts based on soft polymers to create, move, and transform the garments from one shape into another

Dhii

Collaborative Robot

A light-weight, dexterous, and easy to program robot based on the principle of service-oriented architecture and modular intelligent components to offer higher flexibility in smart manufacturing

Farm-in-Pocket

Consumer Photobioreactor

A consumer photobioreactor that cultivates microbes using UV and CO2 and harvests high-density synthesized protein as an alternative source of food nutrients while advocating for nutrient consumption at the point of production

Transgenesis Life

Creating a Transgenic Bee

A design-driven work to create and investigate a transgenic bee having better olfactory capability to sense RDX contamination in soil, higher density of receptacle hairs to transfer pollen, and a greater number of wax glands to repair microstructures

ElbotM

Elderly Mobility Robot

A robot that addresses the diminishing walking abilities of the elderly by incorporating an adaptive walking function to support natural walking, using machine learning (ML) to analyze the walking data, and providing active feedback