The engineer who taught a machine to make rotis

A roti , Pranoti Nagarkar likes to say, is a non Newtonian fluid—its behaviour shifts with pressure, temperature and time. That scientific itch sits at the heart of Rotimatic , the robot she conceived to automate a task millions consider both quotidian and maddening. “You don’t have perfect parameters every time,” she says. “Even humans adjust along the way.” The machine she imagined had to develop the same instinct: to sense, decide and correct in real time so a single button-press could yield a hot, well-puffed roti, again and again.