What is Robotina?
“Robotina is a European company with 28 years of experience in smart technologies for the energy industry and the optimization of smart electrical grids. In 2018, our IoT platform will add blockchain technology and ROX to tokenize its platform and marketplace.”
~The Robotina Team
ICO Alert Quick Facts
- Robotina has been optimizing electrical grids for almost 3 decades.
- $0.05 (average) = 1 ROX token
- Pre-ICO: February 21, 2018 to March 21, 2018.
Main ICO: March 21, 2018 — April 4, 2018 - 570,500,000 total available / 815,000,000 total supply
- The Robotina IoT platform will integrate with Robotina’s devices to optimize power usage and reward users.
Exclusive Q&A with the Robotina Team
1. ICO Alert: For those who are not familiar with Robotina, can you explain what it is, and what the team aims to accomplish?
Robotina is a European company with 28 years of experience, employing over 50 experts in the development of smart technologies for the energy industry. Over the last 5 years, Robotina has been dealing with solutions in the energy sector. Our main expertise is the optimization of smart electrical grids.
We have developed a range of products for home, small business, and large commercial buildings. These will integrate with the Robotina IoT Platform and connect users into a unique virtual community and provide them the benefits of a cheaper energy bill and an upgraded smart grid. The platform is already providing benefits to our existing users.
In 2018, the platform will experience its first major upgrade, adding blockchain technology and ROX to tokenize the platform and platform marketplace. By 2019, the community will be earning significant revenue, and together with a new broker will begin aggregated negotiations with the stakeholders of power grids (producers, distributors, and end users). By 2020, the platform will expand to non-energy business like safety, insurance, security, medical, and more.
Basically, the whole platform development will be realized in two years, from the blockchain and tokens in 2018 all the way to business access to the real IoT Platform in 2020.
2. ICO Alert: How does the Robotina token (ROX) function within the platform, and why is it needed?
The Robotina token (ROX) is a utility token on the Robotina IoT platform marketplace. ROX offers a 3% discount on any product or service bought on the Robotina IoT platform marketplace. Each platform user will eventually get ROX as a reward generated by the community reward system, regardless of whether the product or service has been purchased by any other means of payment. Community means power bargains, savings, and security.
The community is formed by individuals registered on the IoT platform. Each transaction on the platform deducts small piece of the savings generated and converts it to ROX instead of giving it directly back to users as fiat. This will give some users the chance to accumulate and save up some ROX by the time the user’s HEMS [Home Energy Management System] is connected to the platform. By accumulating ROX, users can buy new hardware and services, which in the long term mean more electricity savings and more ROX earned throughout the community.
ROX has the potential to drive energy-efficient behaviour in each household and speed up the process of smart grid stabilisation. Each household in the ROX community will take an active part within the smart grid, with the help of IoT + AI + Blockchain technologies. ROX will optimize energy consumption by 30% and promote power sustainability in the long term.
3. ICO Alert: Robotina has significant history in the industry. Your white paper says you have realized savings of 10–20% in your operations around the world. Can you tell us more details about a specific successful technology and/or local project you’ve implemented?
We will briefly describe some relevant commercial smart energy projects in which we have successfully delivered proprietary control & cloud technology and our advanced Cognitive Optimization System5 (COS) as the enabling technologies.
SPEYER, Germany (2015–2018)
Hitachi from Japan and the City of Speyer, Germany, jointly developed a smart community project with support from NEDO, a Japanese agency for new technology deployment. Robotina designed and implemented a control system, including machine learning and cloud software. The project consists of a PV (Solar) power plant, battery storage, a complex Energy Management System (EMS), consumption prediction, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence.
The system has the choice of multiple energy sources (PV, grid, district heating). It uses Artificial Intelligence to predict the energy consumption of each apartment; it aggregates it and selects the best strategy to minimize energy cost. As a result, energy costs are automatically and continuously optimized. Users enjoy the lowest possible expenses and still retain full comfort.
NEDO SMART GRID PROJECT, Slovenia (2017–2018)
This is a smart grid demonstration project where the next day’s electrical consumption is forecasted for specific grid segments. In case of grid limitations, a critical peak tariff is activated for certain periods of time, thus motivating consumers to reduce their consumption. Robotina delivers integrated Home Energy Management Systems (HEMS) for residential owners which synchronize with critical peak information and automatically lower the consumption to the minimum acceptable level for comfort and safety requirements. The house owner can take advantage of a dynamic tariff without sacrificing his or her comfort.
ENERGIE GRAZ, Austria (2018)
New energy regulations in Austria (2018) promote the installation of renewable energy sources in multi-apartment buildings. A company can invest in a rooftop photovoltaic plant and a battery storage system and attract apartment owners to the use of green energy. Based on its standard HEMS product, Robotina developed a dedicated solution to enable the provider with accurate real-time information on energy usage and the division between different energy sources (PV, battery, grid). This new model of energy supply will enable a more ambitious shift into renewable energy sources.
ENERGY STORAGE SYSTEMS, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, South Africa (2016, ongoing)
Our eSTORE, energy storage and management system, helps thousands of users reduce their energy expenses and increase autonomy. Owners of Photovoltaic Plants (PV) generate their own energy, but often they are not able to consume it, so they have no other option than to sell it to a utility company. Payment for such energy is minimal, several times lower than the energy price, where the same user is forced to buy it from the same utility company. With our smart energy storage and HEMS, users can store their green energy in an eSTORE and use it when needed. In addition, the HEMS controls their energy flow and optimizes it. Users enjoy savings and can control their energy flow.
ICO Alert: What exciting upcoming technologies do you have in development?
We have many experiences with Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, and now diving deep into crypto technologies. It’s an exciting field as a lot of emerging technologies show good potential to push our project further and enhance the platform.
Currently we are fully dedicated to utilizing the potential of smart contracts on the Robotina IoT platform marketplace. We are hoping to use them for subscription management, group buys, crowdfunding and the other services offered on the platform. We’re using Ethereum to develop the smart contracts for the platform marketplace and to manage all crypto transactions, which have shown to be viable use cases.
The cost of transactions and scalability of Ethereum is a bottleneck for deeper integration of the Robotina IoT platform on the Ethereum blockchain, but Ethereum is nonetheless excellent for crypto transactions on the marketplace. Therefore, we are also keeping an eye on IOTA and Xain, to name a few, but their lack of modular adaptability and programmer availability are still too great for us to use them for off-chain transactions while reaping the benefits of speed and cost predictability.
ICO Alert: One of the projects which generated the most excitement in late 2017 was Power Ledger. Could you sum up what makes your product stand out from Power Ledger?
MAJOR DIFFERENCES:
1) Robotina’s solution offers a 15% optimization on a 27,222.00 TWh power market, which equals 4 TWh potential savings by 2020. The Power Ledger business solution is limited to pilot projects, where owners of PV solar plants can eventually sell the energy P2P. However, the whole PV solar market account is less than 1% of the total market, so their business model is limited to a 272.22 TWh market. Another problem with the Power Ledger project is that there are no laws in place for massive P2P trading.
2) Robotina Platform has applied the Internet of Things (IoT) into a solution that enables two-way automatic communication between IoT devices in households and the Robotina IoT platform. The IoT device (HEMS) transfers the data and receives back orders for optimization. Power Ledger has no control over household consumption.
3) The Robotina Platform has applied Artificial Intelligence (AI) into a solution that will help the platform reduce the energy waste in households from the inefficient use of appliances and from unreliable control and monitoring. But Power Ledger cannot program or control the consumption of electricity in households.
4) Both Power Ledger and Robotina have Blockchain-based marketplaces, where the major differences are:
ICO Alert: By their nature, many distributed systems — including your plans for the ROX token — challenge existing monopolies. Do you expect strong opposition from established power monopolies?
No, we do not expect opposition, as these projects have been supported and promoted by governments. The reason for this is simple: The existing power grid has outdated infrastructure and is not capable of coping with electric vehicle growth plans nor with the growth of renewables, which put an extra burden on the power grid because of their uncontrolled production. Therefore, energy-efficient projects have been promoted to increase the capacity of the existing power grid and cope with higher demand for electricity.
It is cheaper to implement an IoT-based smart grid than change the entire power grid, especially when part of the burden will be taken away when households can legally go off-grid and become self-sustainable. We already have products for this off-grid scenario.
ICO Alert: How far along is the project towards its next big launch, and when can contributors expect to fully use the platform? Please feel free to share any recent updates.
The next big step is expected within 3 months, when we tokenize the platform. We expect to complete all cycles of development written in our white paper by the end of 2020 and open the platform to 3rd-party services and products within the Robotina IoT platform marketplace.
ICO Alert: As a non-Robotina question, we like to ask for unique predictions for the ICO and cryptocurrency space in the future. Where do you see both in the next 3–5 years?
We see ourselves as part of a crypto community trying to develop a scaling solution outside of the Robotina IoT platform marketplace. We are keen to go beyond token transactions and smart contracts and explore the opportunities for AI and IoT within the crypto space. IoT security and trust issues could benefit greatly from blockchain. We look towards the future with great optimism.
ICO Restrictions
Citizens or individuals with lawful permanent resident or domicile in the USA, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Algeria, Myanmar (Burma), or Iran are not allowed to contribute to the Robotina crowdsale.
Pre-ICO Information
The pre-ICO began on February 21, 2018 and will end on March 4, 2018. There are a total of 570,500,000 Robotina tokens (ROX) available during the pre-ICO and main ICO, representing 70% of the total ROX supply. As of this writing, 128,886,707 tokens have been sold.
The hard cap for the pre-ICO is $15.5 million. The average cost for 1 ROX token is $0.05, and a 10% bonus is given to pre-sale contributors.
The Robotina pre-ICO currently accepts a number of crypto and fiat currencies, including ETH and USD.
Robotina is an ERC-20 token, so it’s important that contributors use ERC-20 compatible wallets when specifying an address at which to receive their ROX tokens.
ICO Information
The main ICO will begin on March 21, 2018 and will end on April 4, 2018. There are a total of 570,500,000 Robotina tokens (ROX) available during the main ICO, representing 70% of the total ROX supply. A hard cap of $28.5 million is set for this period.
The hard cap for the total sale, including pre-ICO and main ICO, is $28.5 million. The average cost for 1 ROX token is $0.05, and a 5% bonus is given for the first $7 million of contributions, after which the bonus drops to 0%.
Once the hard cap is reached, any funds received will be refunded to contributors.
As with the pre-ICO, the Robotina ICO will accept a number of crypto and fiat currencies, including ETH and USD.
Again, Robotina is an ERC-20 token, so it’s important that contributors use ERC-20 compatible wallets when specifying an address at which to receive their ROX tokens.
Token Distribution Information
There are a total 815,000,000 ROX tokens being created, with 570,500,000 available during the pre-ICO and main ICO.
Any tokens from the 815,000,000 which are not sold during the ICO will not be created. Visit the Robotina website for more information, the KYC process, and contribution addresses.
Token Allocation:
Source: ICO Alert