I am only handling the business and entrepreneurial side of this venture. I am not the one engineering or manufacturing the rover, so the technical details in this post describe the product plan, not something I built myself.
We went to Vedaranyam because reading reports and watching videos was not enough. The only way to understand how salt is actually moved and what hurts the people doing it is to stand on the pans, watch the work, and talk to the workers and the producers.
What we saw was straightforward. Workers harvest the salt and then carry it by hand over short distances, but they repeat those trips dozens of times a day. The load is heavy, the ground is uneven, and the heat makes every trip harder. There is no mechanised help at the small‑scale pans we visited. Some workers use a wooden tray, others just a sack, but the motion is the same: lift, walk, dump, return. A few older workers told us they have chronic back pain that worsens during the harvest season.
Producers told us their biggest worry is sudden rain. When rain hits a freshly harvested pan the salt gets wet, loses quality, and the whole batch can become a loss. They have no reliable way to know when a shower is coming, so they cannot cover the salt in time. A few owners keep a tarp nearby, but spreading it over a large pan takes more time than the warning they get. One producer estimated that a single unexpected shower can wipe out a week’s revenue.
Those two observations — the repetitive manual handling and the rain risk — shaped the product plan directly. The plan now calls for an electric rover that can carry up to 100 kg per trip, reducing the number of manual trips a worker has to make. A weather‑alert feature would pull forecast data and warn the operator early enough to move or cover the salt before it gets wet.
The visit confirmed that the need is real. Workers want less physical effort, and owners want a way to protect their harvest. The next step is to turn those requirements into a testable prototype and run supervised field trials in the same pans where we did the research. We will also capture video of the trials to share with future investors and partners. The footage will help us refine the design before any larger rollout.