Meet BlinkTroll Robotics – a startup helping soldiers train target shooting. See their robot in action in this video
The team behind BlinkTroll Robotics are excited about the journey they are about to take together with their mentors and coaches at Odense Robotics StartUp Fund and the incubator at Danish Technological Institute. CEO and Founder Kenneth explains why he started the company and the plans ahead.
Why is your technology and solution valuable and what challenge does it solve?
Today, all shooting training is on static targets. Yet the challenges soldiers and police officers face on the job are always dynamic and moving. We aim to bridge that gap and provide people, soldiers and police officers with the right tools for training.
What we’ve made is a moving target system that you can put up anywhere. You can put it up between trees, inside the buildings, through doorways.
When people get the challenge of shooting at the moving target, they go out of the training scenario with confidence. Ultimately that’s what we provide: the training effect and confidence.
What’s your personal story?
I’ve been a soldier myself. And I think that it is really fundamental that soldiers have good training.
In Norway, you train in the winter and first you learn fundamental things like how to stay warm and dry, and protect yourself. Then you learn how to handle a weapon. Your weapon is your next best friend beside your boots. I believe it’s really fundamental to master it.
I don’t think it’s enough to give soldiers – our sons and brothers and fathers – rudimentary training. Especially not today in a European war. We need to provide them with proper training. And that’s what drives me every day.
How did your company start?
One day I was using a shooting range that was built up with static targets that popped up on the instructor’s call.
After a few times of going through the range, I knew where the targets were. The only challenge was more or less at what point the guy would press the button for them to pop up.
I figured: what if the target comes moving through the woods? It took me a while before I decided to go all in and make it. But now it’s here and being used for training.
What are your greatest opportunities?
We believe that our greatest opportunity is that there are three million police and military in Europe today carrying weapons. And they very rarely train on moving targets. We believe that that moving target training is really important. And we can provide that solution.
What are your startup’s greatest challenges?
Our greatest challenge today is being able to supply the market properly and to get out there and make ourselves known.
So we need to find the right way to accelerate our business into the market and make ourselves known. We’re just two guys at the moment, so we’re a small company that’s growing.
Why did you apply to the startup fund?
We got to know the guys from Danish Technological Institute. And we had some really fruitful discussions together with them and Odense Robotics. Odense seemed like a very good match for us.
We could see that the people here know hardware. They know robotics and they know business. That was a match that really ignited with us. We saw what we could achieve. Now we see these benefits every day. Every time we need a solution, there is somebody who is able to help us out and get us moving in the right direction.
So what attracted us to the fund and the incubator were the people, the environment and the other companies here that bring this atmosphere of technology and progress.
The environment here at Odense Robotics and Danish Technological Institute is really about having mentoring and sparring partners that have experience in the business, that have actually been in the business and know what it takes. They can see the pain points we have and help us progress and move along beyond that.
What do you hope to achieve during your stay here at the incubator?
We hope to build the proper foundations for the company to grow and scale. And develop our technology into a whole range of solutions.
Our plan for BlinkTroll Robotics is to professionalise and industrialise the production of units by using robots to build them.
We also want to scale the business by creating an organisation and team that can really reach out to users in Europe and elsewhere.