PRE2018 3 Group11:Brainstorm

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Brainstorming Sessions

In multiple brainstorming sessions, we brought forth various possible project ideas. Some of these ideas lasted longer through sessions than others. We explain these ideas knowing that even the minor ones contributed to our thought process. This discussion helped us make a more informed decision on choosing the final topic.

Exploratory Ideas

Kitchen Robot

We present a kitchen assistant robot, a machine with several modular components which enable different cooking functions such as stirring, chopping, adding ingredients at certain times, and so on. The robot can be programmed for different recipes. We realized quickly that such robots exist in industry on a much larger scale, in fact on every manufacturing line of every industrial chemical product. Redesigning it for home use seemed like a viable project idea, however, we found that it already existed as seen in [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.

Firefighting Robot

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.

Medical Nanobot

We also thought of medical nanobots. The idea of medical nanobots is that they can transport small doses 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.

Miner Robot

The 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.

Pet-walking Robot

The last exploratory 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 the point of owning a pet to begin with. 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. It doesn’t solve any major problem.