In an interview, Jagga Raju Nadimpalli, Co-Founder and COO, Perceptyne, speaks with TimesTech about building humanoid robots ground-up in India. Perceptyne Robots was founded by Raviteja Chivukula, Jagga Raju Nadimpalli, and Mrutyunjaya Nadiminti. He explains how deep vertical integration, indigenous R&D, and AI-driven dexterous manipulation are helping Perceptyne deliver global-grade robotics at Indian price points, enabling scalable automation for EMS, automotive, and mid-tier manufacturers while positioning India as a serious global robotics contender.
Read the full interview here:
TimesTech: Perceptyne is building humanoid robots ground-up in India. What motivated this indigenous approach, and how does it shape the company’s long-term vision for competing in the global robotics landscape?
Jagga: At Perceptyne, we always believed that India should not just consume advanced robotics — we should build it. All three founders come with experience each in designing, manufacturing and selling deep-tech products in the Aerospace, Automotive and Electronics industries. Across our careers, we saw the same patterns repeat: automation in India was constrained by imported hardware, fragmented integration, and the absence of indigenous innovation. Most companies assemble components sourced from China or Europe. No one was building the core stack — actuators, motor drivers, firmware, perception systems, and intelligence — in India.
We chose the harder path of building humanoid robots ground-up because true innovation demands control over every layer of the system. By designing hardware, perception, and intelligence in-house, we removed the dependencies that limit flexibility and cost competitiveness. This approach now allows us to adapt robotics to India’s manufacturing realities — high variability, unstructured environments, and cost sensitivity.
Long term, this positions India as a credible alternative to China in advanced robotics. It also allows us to compete globally on both capability and cost, while creating a robotics ecosystem rooted in indigenous engineering excellence. Our vision is simple: build world-class robots in India, for India, and for the world.
TimesTech: You’ve spoken about rivalling Chinese robotics. How is Perceptyne achieving global-grade performance while keeping automation affordable for Indian manufacturers?
Jagga: China dominates global robotics because it controls the supply chain end-to-end. To rival that, we had to rethink how robots are engineered. Instead of assembling off-the-shelf actuators and perception modules, Perceptyne designs and manufactures its own actuator modules, drivers, sensors, and end-effectors. This vertical integration dramatically reduces dependency on foreign components and brings down BOM and integration costs.
Affordability doesn’t come from being “cheaper” — it comes from engineering efficiency. We deliver global-grade performance by combining three layers that usually come from different vendors: hardware, perception (vision, force & tactile sensing), and the intelligence stack. Because all three are built to work seamlessly together, we eliminate the expensive non-recurring engineering (NRE) that system integrators spend 6–12 months on.
Our like-to-like comparison shows we are highly competitive against Chinese arms and significantly more cost-effective than American and European solutions. But performance parity alone is not enough. Indian manufacturers need robots that can handle variability and frequent changeovers. Perceptyne’s dexterous robotic platform — 7-DoF arms, force-adaptive manipulation, and proprietary skill modules — delivers capabilities that traditional robotic arms cannot.
By solving capability + cost simultaneously, we’re making advanced robotics accessible to the entire Indian manufacturing value chain.
TimesTech: Perceptyne claims up to 40% cost reduction for EMS and automotive clients. Can you explain the key technological or operational innovations that make such savings possible?
Jagga: Traditional automation is slow, expensive, and rigid. A typical station takes 6–12 months to automate because system integrators must design custom fixtures, source multiple vendors, and stitch together arms, cameras, and controllers. This entire NRE effort is time-consuming and costly — and non-reusable.
Perceptyne eliminates this overhead. Our robotic system functions as a one-to-one fulfilment for human operator, allowing manufacturers to deploy automation without redesigning their workstation. What normally takes a year can now be done in 20–30 days.
There are three reasons why this drives 30–40% cost reduction:
1. Vertical Integration:
We build actuators, motor drivers, perception modules, and intelligence in-house, significantly reducing hardware costs and integration overhead.
2. Intelligence and hardware capability:
EMS and automotive lines deal with high variability — PCBs with 10–15 variants, parts with changing orientation, and delicate manipulations. Our dual-arm dexterous platform with force and tactile sensing combined with our AI skill modules handles this without custom engineering.
3. Rapid Experimentation:
Clients can test multiple automation use-cases quickly. Faster iteration = lower cost of error and faster ROI.
Instead of replacing humans, we drive 20–30% productivity improvement, fewer defects, and scalable, repeatable automation — which directly translates into operational savings.
TimesTech: Mid-tier manufacturing in India often struggles with automation scalability. How is Perceptyne designing robots, deployment models, and pricing to ensure accessibility for this segment?
Jagga: Mid-tier manufacturers face two structural challenges: automation is too rigid for high-mix production, and traditional robotic cells are too expensive for their scale. We built Perceptyne specifically to bridge this gap.
Our deployment model is simple: instead of redesigning the plant, our robots are plug-and-play additions to existing human workstations. This drastically reduces downtime, redesign effort, and capital expenditure. By compressing automation deployment cycles from 12 months to 4 weeks, we make experimentation financially viable for mid-sized factories.
Pricing is structured to lower adoption barriers — through modular configurations (single-arm, dual-arm, PHI intelligence layer) and phased deployments. Manufacturers can start small, automate critical stations first, and scale as their confidence grows.
The hardware is designed for Indian shop floors: compact, agile 7-DoF manipulators that handle multi-variety tasks, bin picking, PCB handling, assembly, fastening, and delicate manipulation. These are functions mid-tier factories could never automate due to variability.
By combining affordability, flexibility, and dexterity, Perceptyne is democratising automation for India’s mid-tier industrial backbone — a segment historically underserved by global robotics.
TimesTech: Perceptyne combines AI with advanced robotics manipulation and perception. What breakthroughs in indigenous R&D are enabling your robots to perform dexterous, intelligent tasks traditionally considered too complex to automate?
Jagga: Our biggest breakthrough is building the most capable robotics hardware that could unlock the AI technology developed for the digital world to act in the physical world catalysing the Physical-AI revolution.
Key innovations include:
1. 7 Degrees of Freedom robotics arms with integrated torque sensing combined with end effectors with force and tactile sensing:
These allow tight space manoeuvring and precise micro-manipulations — rotating components in-hand, handling delicate PCBs, placing connectors with force feedback, or orienting parts dynamically. We filed patents for several end-effector mechanisms.
2. Advanced perception stack:
Our vision + Force sensing + Tactile Sensing fusion enables robots to handle unstructured environments. For example, using proprietary algorithms, our robots can identify and pick from bins of thousands of identical bolts in random orientations — a task traditionally considered too chaotic for automation.
3. Proprietary skill modules:
These are AI models trained on task-specific proprietary datasets. Whether it’s PCB manipulation or precision assembly, each skill module encodes repeatable intelligence, allowing rapid deployment across multiple clients.
4. Dual-arm coordination:
Our platform’s coordinated manipulation mimics human bimanual actions, unlocking tasks that single robotic arms simply cannot perform.
These advancements let our robots perform tasks once considered “unautomatable,” particularly in high-variety manufacturing.
TimesTech: What are the biggest challenges you face in building complex humanoid robots locally, across supply chain, talent, or engineering, and how does localization ultimately enhance quality, control, and reliability compared to imported solutions?
Jagga: Building humanoid robots in India is incredibly challenging because we are creating an entire ecosystem from scratch — actuators, drivers, sensors, firmware, perception, and intelligence. The biggest hurdles fall into three areas:
1. Supply Chain:
India doesn’t yet have a mature robotics hardware supply chain. We overcame this by designing 70–80% of critical components — including actuators and drivers — in-house. This gives us precision, reliability, and rapid iteration capabilities that import-dependent companies simply don’t have.
2. Talent:
Robotics talent requires multidisciplinary expertise — mechanical, embedded, AI, perception, control systems. We invested heavily in building a team that can innovate across these domains, rather than relying on fragmented vendor ecosystems.
3. Engineering Complexity:
Humanoid systems require tight integration of hardware, sensing, and intelligence. Vertical integration ensures faster debugging, better hardware-software harmony, and complete control over quality.
Localization ultimately gives us quality, speed, and reliability advantages over imported solutions. When every component is understood, tuned, and manufactured close to the engineering team, iteration cycles shrink dramatically. It also means clients get faster response times, lower lifecycle costs, and a product built for India’s real-world manufacturing environments — not idealized European shop floors.
