PRE2018 3 Group11:Brainstorm

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Brainstorm Sessions

In multiple sessions, we came up with various possible projects that we could work on. In this section we will explain these possible ideas and elaborate on them. First we discuss the ideas that we have discarded and explain the reasoning why we have discarded them. Then, we proceed to explain, per section, the ideas that we have worked out to a larger extent as we believed it to be necessary to make a decision being informed.

Discarded Ideas

Firstly we present a robot that will help in the kitchen, to which we will refer as the ‘’cooking robot’’. Consider the scenario where a chef in a busy restaurant is preparing a caramel for one of their desserts. Making a caramel involves melting sugar, amongst other things, and continuously stirring in a pan on medium heat. The chef doing this preparation cannot leave their station. If they do, the caramel will not be a good one. The cooking robot aims to solve this problem by stirring in place of the chef, allowing them to walk around and continue supervising the kitchen.

The main reason why we had decided not to do this idea is due to the fact that it is something that already exists to some extent. We would simply be copying other designs, such as shown in this video. We do not think that this problem is an interesting one to solve when compared with other problems to be listed on this page.

A second idea that we came up with were two types of drones that are applicable to firefighting.

• ‘’’Type 1’’’: A firefighting drone built on a previous group ( link ). We quickly discarded this idea as we don’t believe we can contribute much to the design proposed by the previous group.
• ‘’’Type 2’’’: A drone that, in case of a fire, autonomously finds children (or even animals) that are stuck in a room, either due to something that has collapsed or due to the doors automatically closing. The drone would carry both conventional gas masks for adults knowing how to apply them, as well as a custom made tent, large enough for a small child or animal. The material of this tent would filter smoke and turn it into oxygen, prolonging the life of child (or animal) hopefully enough until the firefighters arrive. The problem with this idea is that there are a lot of practical concerns. How would a tent be deployed? How would the drone fly in the heat? How would we deal with the fact that oxygen is created in an environment where this could lead to explosions? While these concerns are not prohibiting us from choosing this idea as our project, we don’t believe it is realistic to assume that everyone has a drone in each of their rooms.

Thirdly, we could design medical nanobots. The idea of medical nanobots is that they can transport a specific (small) amount of medicine to specific parts of your body. If the medicine is dangerous to other parts of the body, then these nanobots would effectively mitigate said issue. While there is certainly a field of application, we do not believe that we have the required medical, let alone nano-engineering, expertise to design this kind of robot.

A fourth idea is to eliminate the problem of people dying to due to manual labour in mines. It is clear to anyone that mines collapse too much, and that it is just in general a dangerous profession. The problem with tackling this issue is twofold, namely, there already exist autonomous mining solutions and secondly for a (not so ethical) company the death of a person is cheaper than the destruction of an expensive mining robot.

A fifth disregarded idea is a robot that can walk your pets. Immediately at the thought of going through with this, we can easily imagine that it won’t be a commercial success. Part of why people want pets is because they want companionship. Having a robot take care of your pet completely goes against this. Another reason why it won’t work is because your pet will most likely be scared by the robot. It might even try to attack and damage the robot, which is undesirable. The main reason, however, for us not doing this as project is because we do not see any added value if this robot would exist. It doesn’t solve any major problem.