19. Invention, intellectual property and income¶
conceptualize -> fabrication -> assembly -> tests -> (packaging) -> final test
Overview¶
This week, I wrote a dissemination plan for my Final Project.
Goals¶
While robotics have wide adaoption in logistics fields, it has not been widely used as a food delivery service from restaurant to pickup points. Reasons for the low adoption rate include the widely popular Grab delivery, UberEats, Gojek delivery etc, where an actual human delivers food to your doorstep.
However, if a pandemic such as COVID-19 were to happen again, how can we be more prepared? The less we contact, the safer our food, no? We unnecessarliy contact with not only our delivery driver, but also with food prepared by other stall owners. We can reduce this risk using automation with robotics.
Why Holonomic?¶
Holonomic robots has more flexibility to maneuver in tight spaces. Couple that with less jerky movement compared to 2WD robots or even walking robots, this configuration should keep our food well in place and in check.
Unique Selling Point¶
I plan to make this robot open source with MIT liscence, so that people can contribute to this project in the future. The robot is a means to complete a service which is food delivery, but the robot itself can be so much more as well. I envision a day where many robots exist along the same region to complete different tasks, implementing some form of open standard, much like ROS’s open-rmf, but focusing on lower level robot control instead.
Disseminate¶
As I am currently working with Invictus Global Schoolhouse, I saw that the teachers actually carry a huge polyterene container with all the students meal and a name list, manually disseminating foods to the students. I think this is a great opportunity to automate the entire process, from picking up food from canteens or outdoor delivery to students getting their own food and removing the need to manually check namelist.
Updates to Global Evaluator
To reach these teachers, I planned to secure a minimum of around USD500 to build a larger version of what I planned to build in my final project as a proof of concept. My plan is to pitch the idea to the CTO of Sing-Ed Global Schoolhouse Mr Hee Joh Liang, and demonstrate the basic capabilities it has. The pitch will be structured in the following manner. At this stage, no monetization is to be made yet.
- Main problem statement: Teachers manually checking if students are distributed their foods is an extremely laborious task.
- What the teacher needs to solve: an automated approach of providing students their meals so that they can focus on supervising students
- How to solve: Use a robot to deliver the foods to the students, students able to tap their student cards and retrive foods, or connect to the robot from their phones via bluetooth
- Problems faced: There might be other more efficient ways of solving, but they are intrusive to the environment in the school (as the school is in a rented lot in the building, minimal modifications can be done), a robot is the best way to solve it as it does not require modification to the landscape
If the pitch is bought and the funds are secured, I plan to do a survey with the teachers about its actual usefulness. This will ensure that teachers are on board with the idea of robots automating this particular mundane task.
After that, we can look into scaling up the delivery system as a whole. Instead of focusing on Invictus only, I plan to pitch to Venture Capitalists for a fund of at least USD 10k, and ask Lecturers in Singapore Polytechnic (where the FabLab Node is at) and get students to work on the robot as their Final Year Projects. From here, we rent out robots as well as managing software as a suite, where we can charge the school itself (B2B model).The most likely scenario after this is that this project will branch out from Sing-Ed Global Schoolhouse and into a separate company/entity. Future ideas beyond that is to consider joining back into Chip Eng Seng, the parent company of Sing-Ed global Schoolhouse, and explore into the hospitality sector as co-bots.
The interesting thing about this model is that the robot is open-sourced, meaning people can contribute or even remix the robots to fit their needs, and we can expand the functionalities of the robots from there. The robot itself grows as an ecosystem, and as it gets bigger, the company might be acquired by other robotics company. It will depend on how well the company is doing, how well it is evaluated at, and whether people are willing to continue to pay for robot as a service to consider if the company should be sold off.
Regardless of what happens to the company however, a version of the robot will remain fully open source under Creative Commons.
End updates
Benefits¶
Teachers are less stressed in the long run, not needing to split their efforts in their work and handling students up until students are eating, and only focus on the previous. Students have a taste of what it feels like to live in the future. Robots have more exposure to challenges and we can re-evaluate whether robotics delivery is truly the right solution
There are currently not many robots that do this, with the more notable one being Starship. It is interesting to see how engaged the students are, and they do not mind whether it is a human or a robot that is delivering their meals. In fact, some young students are even excited to see a starship robot fufiling their orders.
Worst comes to worst?¶
Holonomic robots have wide applications in logistics (as aforementioned). These robots can potentially be pivoted to a field that uses them, as fundamentally they are the same, just using different functions and attachments to accomplish task that require delivery frorm point A to point B. If we can grasp this essence, it is always possible to hop between ideas and expound upon the infinite possibilities that exist.
Admin tasks¶
The presentation and video files can be found in the root directory
