Hacking our way to Automation
We recently held a hackathon here at Waterstons in order to investigate some ways in which we can innovate in various sectors, but also to have some fun ‘hacking’ together a solution over two days. Hackathon projects had to follow one of four themes:
- Industry 4.0, and the four key challenges around this: Automation, Integration, Information and Innovation.
- Making education more accessible via the use of technology.
- Improving efficiency in distribution and transport.
- Knowledge Management in AEC: specifically how we can improve the capture, retention, and distribution of knowledge.
We got together and discussed some possible ideas, settling on using a robot called the Makeblock mBot to create an autonomous robot that could follow a path, pick up and drop off objects from predefined stations. Whilst this initially seemed like a simple enough idea, we quickly realised that it came with a whole host of unforeseen challenges. Our final solution has some fun features (video included below): with our robot ‘Billy’ and his furry companion able to go to several pickup and drop-off locations and even (mostly) avoid objects in its path.
However, achieving this was not as straightforward as we originally predicted. We encountered many issues, many of which stemmed from the fact that we were programming in C++ rather than the usual C#, but by communicating and experimenting we always found a way to work around the problems we encountered.
Through putting this project together we garnered many insights into the potential problems that could arise in producing a similar prototype on an enterprise level. Firstly, our simple robot was unable to move with the same high precision that a robot used on a much larger scale would do. Further, this robot would ideally have a high level of environmental awareness so that it can correct its path from the slightest errors.
From the lessons learnt on our project, we would predict that perhaps the biggest challenge would be to encode both the robot’s awareness of its surroundings and awareness of its location within the factory floor. We found encoding the turn angles particularly challenging, with the process of trial and error affected by everything from the robot’s weight to the surface on which it was moving. This thus created difficulties in crafting our robot’s function. Deciding to use Lego to build our robot’s object-holding function, we had decide whether we wanted to build this in the form of a trailer it would pull, a version we had to eventually abandon as issues of drag and weight proved too significant to effectively mitigate, to a container on top ‘pick-up truck’ style. Throughout these, we had to consider the Lego pieces we had at our disposal, as well as the balance and weight of the robot.
All in all, we were happy with the development of Billy the robot and what we managed to achieve with a simple child’s toy, and as a team we had a valuable look into the challenges and processes that may become more and more prevalent as automation becomes an increasingly large part of industry. That being said, if anyone at Amazon would like some insights into ‘Billy’, you know where to find us.
