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1. Principles and practices

This week I worked on defining my final project and started getting used to the documentation process.

Initial Plan

I wanted to do something related to robotics, while helping people out in a somewhat meaningful way. I still haven’t decided what exactly to do, so I list 2 ideas below.

Food delivery robot

Late January, I saw on grocery delivery robots. It delivers groceries to homes of people after they have placed their order online, eliminating the tiring journey of bringing the grocery back to the people.

This made me think, are there robots that deliver food to people? Surely this isn’t a foreign concept. After a quick googling, I found an article by FoodPanda on their collaboratiion with Whizz Mobility and OTSAW, of food delivery robots in the Nanyang Technology University (NTU) campus adn Punggol district, Singapore.

These types of robots require booking in advance, and they will deliver goods to a location within the allocated time slot.

An idea popped up in my mind, could we have a robot within an office space/canteen space that stores food, goes around and ask people what they want to eat? Or even better, people can view where the robot is within the viccinity, and tell the robot to go to their location with their food? Implementation wise, it can be a few types of food ready to be served and selected by customers, or they can order it online and the canteen cook will prepare the food, and be delivered to them; or, we can food delivery services like FoodPanda and GrabFood drop off their food in the robot and the robot will serve the items!

I’m not very good at drawing by hand, nonetheless, this is what I got:

Food delivery

FabInventory Robot

Inspired by warehouse robots, where they efficiently pick and place pallets, I wanted to make a robot that can do something similar as well. Last week, I went to an Electronics Lab in NUS, and found it extremely difficult to find parts that I need due to the lack in experience of what part goes where in a spinning rack.

Is this a roulette machine?

This got me thinking, is it possible to have an easier system for students to get the parts they need?

FabInventory Robot idea 1:

  1. Add individual sensors on a rack, containing said electronic parts. Then, have a search system, where user requests parts which they want and the container section lights up with the color of their choice.

bling bling drawers

FabInventory Robot idea 2:

  1. Have a moving robot base, which checks what orientation the rack is currently in. When a part is requested, the robotmoves the rack to the correct orientation, then the correct coordinates of the electronics drawer/compartment.

robot take parts

For FabInventory robot, I’m more in favor of idea 1, as it seems more fun and straightforward for the user. The second option allows more mobility, as the robot can transport materials to different locations within the FabLab; it might even be more convinient for FabLabs that are not contained within one single building, making fabrication more seamless.

Future plans and references

Below are some of the past year projects I saw, some of them are more relevant than the others, but I plan draw inspiration on how others execute their plan in building their robots.

What’s next?

Something that I want to learn is to do spiral development. I hope to better manage my time and expectation for FabAcademy project early rather than late.

Last update: February 15, 2022