Meanwhile, a Lyon-based company, imagines robots at the service of humans

On the Doua campus in Villeurbanne, in the premises of INSA-Valor, the Meanwhile company has been designing robots since the end of 2017. “I had been working in robotics for 25 years when I decided to create Meanwhile“, explains Sacha Stojanovic, founder and CEO of the start-up. Its objective: to provide technologies at the service of humans, so that they can perform tasks with higher added value“meanwhile” (traduction by Meanwhile).

With the help of four business angels, Sacha Stojanovic founded Meanwhile to manufacture collaborative mobile robots for businesses. The task of the robot depends on the sector of activity that solicits the start-up “In industry, for example, the first sector that called on us, our robots retrieve crates from one work island and bring them to the next, which prevents human operators from doing so and reduces the risk of musculoskeletal disorders or accidents at work”, explains Sacha Stojanovic. The robot follows virtual paths to navigate and can manage on its own once it has learned its environment.