M2M Economy Team ODD.Bot — Self-owned autonomous driving on-demand delivery robot
“We aim to inspire, test, build, demo and show a working prototype with a self-owned autonomous driving on-demand delivery robot that can be easily fetched or booked,” says Martijn Lukaart, Team Captain of M2M Economy Team ODD.Bot. He heads an experienced team, that came in second at an earlier hackathon. This time, they’re here to win! But they’re not lowering their ambitions. If anything, they’ve doubled down on them. ODD.Bot is an on-demand delivery robot with a supremely practical purpose: delivering stuff to where you need it, on-demand. What if everything you needed could be delivered automatically and autonomously to where you needed it, for free? Crazy stuff right? Wrong: Team ODD.Bot is close to figuring out how to do just that.
After the first 24 hours, the team have gone a lot deeper down the rabbit hole. A couple of meta-levels in fact. Martijn Lukaart, Team Captain of M2M Economy Team ODD.Bot: “What drives us is that we aim for more equal distribution of prosperity and we do it by enabling a society in which information can flow freely to energize the optimal flow of matter. This actually drills down to decision making models for robots or agents in the ecosystem that we built. We’ve built a prototype for a machine to machine machine economy and that decision making model is based on the incentives we give to the robots. The incentives make use of the blockchain to make this a decentralized autonomous organization. So this is in a nutshell what we have built.”
After interviewing several taems on the Machine to Machine Track, a general question began to emerge in my head that I just had to ask at least once to one of the actual teams instead of just hearing it mentioned by observers. So I asked Martijn why the track he’s working in is famed for being the most far-out track in this hackathon.
“I think one of the key things is the track sponsor. He really challenges us to think about the future and he uses the example of trying to explain that all the information of the world is available under your thumb to somebody 100 years ago,” says Martijn.
According to Martijn, the team is now looking 100 years into the future and has started to build this future today. They firmly believe in Einstein’s concept of E is MC squared, which means energy is matter and matter is energy. ODD.Bot believes that over time it will be possible to have all the the energy we need available under our thumb. What this implies is that matter can exist the moment that we need it. When we need something, it will be there. And that is worth working on!
