Re: ENSC Project Proposal for Remote Control Snow Blower Robot

Transcription

1 HelperTech. School of Engineering Science, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6 January 25, 2010 Dr. Andrew Rawicz School of Engineering Science Simon Fraser University Burnaby, BC V5A 1S6 Re: ENSC Project Proposal for Remote Control Snow Blower Robot Dear Dr. Rawicz: The enclosed document, Proposal for Remote Control Snow Blower Robot, clearly describes our project for the ENSC440 Capstone Project. The team of HelperTech is proposing this project to build a robot called RoboBlow that allows people to clean snow outdoor by remote controlling a robot without the necessity of going out the house in person. Our proposal provides an overview of the project which consists of: possible design solutions and information, estimated cost and funding, tentative project schedule, and team description and organization. Further it briefly discusses the market strategies of the project and the robot. HelperTech is a research team found by four talented and innovative senior engineering students: Leo Cheng, Peter Hsiao, Joseph Shen, and YuYuan Liu. If there are any questions or concerns regarding our proposal, please feel free to contact me by phone or by . Sincerely, Leo Cheng President and CEO, HelperTech Phone: (604) hpc5@sfu.ca Enclosure: Proposal for Remote Control Snow Blower Robot

2 Project Proposal Remote Control Snow Blower Robot Spring 2011 Submitted to: Andrew Rawicz (ENSC 440) Michael Sjoerdsma (ENSC 305) Project Team: Leo Cheng ( ) Peter Hsiao ( ) YuYuan Liu ( ) Joseph Shen ( )

3 Exective Summary Have you ever imagined that after a snow storm in a cold winter day, you can just sit on your coach, enjoying a cup of hot chocolate and watching your favorite TV program without worrying about the snow sitting on the sidewalk? Have you ever hoped that you can just wake up like any other day, open your garage and begin a wonderful day without the pain of removing the snow piled up on your driveway? For people like us living in the northern countries with snowy winter, we believe the answer would be yes. This is why HelperTech would like to provide a solution by introducing our revolutionary product, the RoboBlow. The idea behind RoboBlow is very simple: To prevent people from exposing to hazardous weather condition during the winter So, when it snows, we can just stay inside our warm comfy home and remotely control this user friendly little helper to remove the snow. The concept of RoboBlow is essentially the same as snow throwers that are already popular among snow removing tools and available on the markets. However, by robotizing this already existing product, we can immediately see the advantages of the combination. Not only the device can be controlled wirelessly, but it can also be self-guided as an option to save people some time in busy mornings for example. We can add features like cameras to provide users with instant feedback of what the robot is doing and the status of the robot. We can also add a salt spraying unit to the robot to prevent the forming of black ice after snow has been removed. HelperTech consists of four senior engineering students with decent backgrounds and training in the disciplines of electronics and systems engineering. We are always passionate about problem solving and looking for ways that would provide convenience and help people with everyday life. This project is multi-disciplined and will require the knowledge of embedded software programming, control system with motors and sensors, power electronics, communications, and mechanical engineering. The development process of this project will take approximately ten consecutive weeks. We plan to test out the prototype system by the middle of March, and present it during the second week of April. The potential funding source for this project would be the SFU Engineering Student Society and we will also look for other interested partners in the future. 1

4 Table of Contents Exective Summary Introduction System Overview Possible Design Solutions Snow Shovel & Ice Pick Anti-icing Chemicals Snow Clearing Vehicles Snow Blower Proposed Design Solution Benefit to Society Market Plan and Consideration Possible Sources of Information Budget and Funding Schedule Team Organization & Group Dynamics Company Profile Conclusion References

5 1. Introduction According to Heart & Stroke foundation of Canada, there are approximately 70,000 heart attacks and 50,000 strokes each year in Canada which account for two of the three leading diseases that result death. From the same website, it also indicates that snow shoveling in extreme cold weather has a great impact on the cause of heart failures. Of course, snow shoveling is just one of the many factors that causes heart failures. However heart diseases are not the only risk associated with snow removing, just consider injuries and accidents that might happen by walking on driveways and sidewalks with slippery surface. With the aging of baby boomers who attribute to one third of the population in Canada as indicated by CBC news, the issues of how to provide a safety and comfort living environment for this aging population have become an important concern in the recent years. Therefore, we believe by introducing products like RoboBlow would help preventing people especially seniors or people with disability from exposing to hazardous environment in everyday live. The control of RoboBlow for snow removal is accomplished by using a remote controller which allows the user to just stay indoors and operate the device. There are cameras installed on the robot so the user is able to monitor the operation and the status of the robot by watching the instant video from the LCD screen on the wireless controller. Through the controller, the user can control the speed and the direction of the robot. The user is able to turn on/off the blower and change the direction of blowing so the unwanted snow can be shot in desired orientation. With a salt spraying unit mounted on the robot, the user is able turn on/off the feature through the remote controller as well. Self-guided mechanism might also be implemented into RoboBlow so the user does not have to spend time monitoring the robot. However, due to the complexity of the system and time limitations, we might not be able to construct this module to our project at the moment. This proposal will first discuss about the system overview and design solutions of our robotic blower. Team organization and company profile sections are then followed to 3

6 indicate the backgrounds and experience of each member and the duties assigned to each of us. Also, administrative issues such as funding and scheduling are briefly mentioned in order to help us managing our budgets and timing. Finally, a conclusion is provided to summarize our proposal. 2. System Overview The RoboBlow works as demonstrated in figures 1. Suppose there was a heavy snow and right now the householder is about to use the robot to clean up the snow in the yard. The householder could just sit inside the house to control the robot by using the remote controller. The screen on the remote controller will display the real-time video captured by the cameras on the robot. In this way, the householder will easily know the location of the robot and issue the proper command. Figure 1: Overall System Diagram 4

7 The block diagram in Figure 2 describes how this whole process works. This product will use two MCUs to provide the capability of remote control and robot control. One MCU (MCU1) will be in the remote controller while the other (MCU2) will be placed inside the robot. Once the householder press any buttons on the control panel, MCU1 will process the signal and send it to MCU2 inside the robot wirelessly. After receiving this signal, MCU2 will process it and send it to the mechanical parts which will implement the corresponding actions. Note that our product not only provides the snow thrower function but also provides salt spraying. Figure 2: System Block Diagram 5

8 3. Possible Design Solutions There are many existing methods for snow removal. Still it doesn t seem to have an effective and convenient solution to remove snow and ice on sidewalk, and usually people need to remove snow manually outdoors. See below common methods for snow removal. 3.1 Snow Shovel & Ice Pick Using snow shovel and ice pick is probably the most common and simple method for snow removal by individual. People use snow shovel to push and lift snow off the road or sidewalk and use ice pick to break ice on the ground. However, removing snow by person with these tools is a considerable hard exercise which requires a lot of time and effort. 3.2 Anti-icing Chemicals Spraying chemical on snow or ice can be an effective solution for snow removal depends on the working environment. The most common example is salt as it is cheap and the freezing point of salt water is less than 0 C. However, salt does not function to malt ice and snow if the temperature is lower than the freezing point of salt water. Some other organic compounds and liquid chemical have also been developed to melt snow and ice. Still, using chemicals may cause environmental issue and the chemicals are not reusable. 3.3 Snow Clearing Vehicles Snow clearing vehicles is like a big truck that pushes snow aside or off the road. Some snow clearing vehicles may also spray anti-icing chemicals on the road or carry huge amount of snow away instead of pushing it aside the road. However, it is usually done by government when huge snow fall occurs, and it usually does not remove snow off the sidewalk. 6

9 3.4 Snow Blower Snow blower is a machine to help removing snow by throwing or blowing snow and ice away. It could be like a small vehicles or even a smaller machine that can be used by a single person. For its small size, it can be used not only on roadway but also in sidewalk. The only disadvantage of using this method is that it may be expensive to purchase the machine and the user still needs to expose to freezing temperature outdoor. 4. Proposed Design Solution Our proposed design solution is targeting to the normal family. Our product is a snow blower robot with two innovative characters. Firstly, people can do the remote control without keeping watching the robot. The controller itself has a high quality LCD screen that can display the real-time HD video captured by the camera from the robot. In order to guarantee the video quality, the video data is further processed by a new coding technology owned by Dr. Jie Liang. So by watching that video, you will feel like you are just directly monitoring the robot outside. Secondly, the working routine of the robot can be pre-programmed. Imagining that: The householder can just press some buttons on the robot and drink some coffees or enjoy the TV show at home. After one or two hours when the robot finishes the job, the yard is all cleaned up and the robot has already stopped at storage room automatically. By using pre-programmed function in our product, you will be that person! It is an intelligent slave for you! 4.1 Benefit to Society This product is able to provide huge benefits to the family and society. It can provide the significant convenience to the family. 7

10 In winter, shoveling snow is a very tough job. People have to spend couple of hours working under the hazardous cold weather. If the snow is heavy, it can even take longer time. By using the RoboBlow, people can either control the robot inside the house or pre-program the working routine, and the robot will do all the things left for householders. In this way, people can save those couple of hours to do whatever they want. This product can also prevent unnecessary injuries caused by shoveling snow manually. Shoveling snow outside requires the worker to use some solid and sharp tools such as shovel and to deal with the slippery road condition. Any occurrence of small mistakes could make the worker injured. However, our product frees the workers from working outside; instead, they just need to stay inside the house. Thus, comparing with the traditional way, working inside highly decreases the possibility of related injury occurrence. Moreover, this product could assist the seniors and disabled people to clean up the snow in the yard. The heavy physical work will be done by the robot; all the seniors and disabled people need to do is to play around with the controller which is physically allowable for most of them. Comparing with other existing snow cleanup product in the market, ours is the only one that can 100% free the workers from such heavy physical labor. In addition, it saves a lot of valuable time for the workers. The most original snow cleanup product is just a shovel, which requires a lot of time and heavy physical labor from the workers. The better one is an automatic snow thrower, but it still needs human force to move it when it is working. Unlike the shovel, it decreases the intensity of work, but people still need to drive the machine under the cold weather. Our product only needs people to sit inside the warm house and wait for the robot finishing the job. If you want, you can monitor and control the robot by remote controller. Life becomes such easy! 4.2 Market Plan and Consideration In order to take up the market as early as possible, we have made a very comprehensive plan to develop this product in the shortest developing cycle while keeping the good product quality. The whole product development will have three phases. The product developed by each phase is ready for customer purchases. In this way, we can keep the 8

11 healthy fund-chain, so that the development of next phase will have enough funding. Each phase and its important features are listed below: Phase 1 product: The robot can be remotely controlled to clean up the snow. The real-time images captured by the camera on the robot can be displayed on the LCD screen on the remote controller. Phase 2 product: The working routine can be pre-programmed by the user. Artificial Intelligence will be built in the robot. More advanced mechanical system will replace the original one to adapt different terrain. Phase 3 product: More artificial intelligence will be built in. Fix bugs. The designate development period for each phase is about 3 months. However, as we only have no more than 13 weeks to develop the product, we will only focus on phase 1. In other words, after 13 weeks, phase1 product will be ready for the market. Besides time limitation, we also have other constraints to be confronted with. They are funding and component purchases. We do not have too much funding for this project, but we agreed that each person in the company will share the development cost. We will also try our best to save the cost. For component purchases, we are not very familiar with the location of purchases for industry components. However, this problem should not be difficult to solve, either we can ask professors in the school or search online. Another potential problem that might slow down our development process is the component shipment time. Fortunately, we have already anticipated this problem and finished the first cycle component purchase. The components are expected to be arrived around Jan 27 th. In summary, this product has a huge potential market. It is better than any other existing snow removal product in the market. We will use the least amount of time to develop a mature product for the market. Three phases strategy will provide us a stable fund-chain for the further development. 9

12 5. Possible Sources of Information For this project, we have many connections that we can get valuable information from. First of all, our ENSC friends had also done ENSC440 Capstone Project about creating a robot before, for instance: Jason Tsai, Steven Choi, and Sean Feng. They are experts on hardware connection and software implementation and are personally close friends with us. It is the most convenient for us to ask them for help whenever we have questions. Secondly, the experts from SFU ENSC faculty, Professor Lucky and Professor Patrick, may also provide advice to our project. Most of our team members are taking ENSC 425 with Lucky and we frequently ask him for help. He is eager to help students with project and is very reliable for our hardware consideration. Professor Patrick is an expert on motors. We asked him for advice when choosing the parts for our projects. He has gaven decent advice about what parts we should choose, what we should consider, and what we might not want to do. It would have been a lot more difficult without his help. Furthermore, much of our help could come from our group s family. One of our members, YuYuan Liu s father is a professional engineer in the industry. His expertise is on the MCU control and wireless communication. We can get so much valuable information from him. Lastly, the owner of LEE s ELECTRONICS has also provided us valuable information regarding the parts we are buying for the project. Of course, there are also many valuable sources of information can be found in the internet for our project. 10

13 6. Budget and Funding This is a considerably expensive project to build. The most significant part of our money will be spent on the snow thrower. Also we choose to use higher level microcontrollers as we need to run video processing and wireless communication and other processes simultaneously. See below table for the list of component and estimated cost of the project: Table 1: Equipment List and Estimated Cost Equipment List Estimated Unit Cost Yardworks 9A / 16-in Electric Snow Thrower $170 Motomaster Utility Battery x 2 $120 DC motors x 4 + Drive axles, gears, etc $300 Robot body (Acrylic board from Industrial Plastic and Paint) $100 Motomaster Eliminator Intelligent Battery Charger 12/8/2A $100 MCU x 2 $200 Camera x 4 $200 Electronic components for remote controller + Electronic component for robot control $120 Total Cost $1310 We have applied for the Engineering Science Student Endowment Fund provided by ESSS and the Wighton Development Fund. Further funding source might also be considered. Otherwise we will cover the rest cost ourselves. 11

14 7. Schedule Below is a Time Line Gantt Chart showing the expected time and schedule we will spend in our project. 23/1/2011 2/2/ /2/ /2/2011 4/3/ /3/ /3/2011 3/4/2011 Motors able to move Control Wheel's direction/speed power switch for snow thrower snow thrower direction power distribution circuit Camera processing salt spraying unit motors for camera First Integration Wireless communication Second Integration cable release automation Final Integration Figure 3: Gantt Chart 8. Team Organization & Group Dynamics HelperTech consists of four diligent, creative, and precise engineers: Leo Cheng, Peter Hsiao, Joseph Shen and Yuyuan Liu. Peter and Leo are in System engineering. They are good at designing the mechanical parts and programming with embedded system. Joseph and Yuyuan are from electrical engineering. They are very familiar with circuit design. Yuyuan also has strong techniques on embedded system programming. Our diverse interest and advantage will contribute to the success of this project. For more information about our team members, please refer to the company profile section. Since at the beginning of the company establishment, we only have four people and 12

15 limited funding. Everyone in the company will play two rules, political rule and technical rule. For political rule, Leo, our CEO, will be in charge of overall development progress and resolve any conflicts both inside and outside the company. Peter, our CFO, will focus on the budget supervision. He will try his best to reduce the development cost. YuYuan Liu will take care of everyday technical operation process and directly report to CEO. Joseph, our VP marketing, will try to do the product advertisement and promotion. He will also try to monitor the market situation. For the technical rule, Leo and YuYuan are responsible for creating the control system for the robot. Peter and Joseph are responsible for constructing the mechanical parts and creating some power transmission circuit. In addition, for the fast development of our company, team members are encouraged to contribute more than the responsibilities stated above. In order to maintain the positive group dynamics and expedite, accurate communication, every week CEO will hold a meeting in which everyone will report the weekly progress and blockers. To make sure that controlling system division and mechanical & electrical system division have enough understanding to each other, YuYuan and Peter will be the coordinators for these two divisions. They are the bridge of the information for these two systems. In addition, the team will assign one person every week to arrange the project journals written by everyone, which afterwards, will be read by CEO or other team members if necessary. This way, CEO can manage the whole progress of the development. Our company values fostering employees. We are not extracting their talents; instead, we are enlightening them to obtain more personal success. The task assignment is not only based on the team member s technical strength and weakness, but also their interests. Thus, people will show more motivations when doing the project. Proper team work and positive group dynamics will enforce our friendship and accelerate the development process. I believe by the leading of CEO, we will finish the project successfully. 13

16 9. Company Profile Leo Cheng Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Leo is a system engineering student and is doing his last academic semester in SFU. He has also completed all three required co-op teams, where two co-op teams are completed in Broadcom and one co-op team is completed as research co-op in SFU. During his co-op teams and academic study, he gained experience on programming in a variety of programming languages which includes: C/C++, Java, Matlab, Qt (C++), OpenGL (C++), Perl, Tcl, Ruby, Icon, and SQL. Peter Hsiao Chief Finance Officer (CFO) Peter is currently doing his last academic semester as a systems engineering student in Engineering Science, SFU. During the school years, Peter has gained strong fundamentals in the fields of control systems, mechanical design, and software programming. During his first co-op placement as an embedded software designer in Research In Motion, he has acquired decent knowledge in embedded systems and embedded programming. He has also developed skills in designing mechanical parts and operating power tools in machine shop in his second Co-op term as an undergraduate research assistant. YuYuan Liu Vice President of Operations (VP Operations) YuYuan Liu is a fourth year Electrical Engineering student at SFU with two co-op terms in Nokia. He is an experienced C/C++ programmer. He migrated and modified a web based testing framework to a Qt (C++) and QML based testing framework in Nokia. He programmed with C in real-time embedded system to control robot arms. He is familiar with Ruby scripting and Linux shell languages. Further, he is familiar with designing analog and digital circuit. Finally, as an engineer, he deeply understands the importance of team work and I am good at collaboration and cooperation. 14

17 Joseph Shen Vice President of Marketing (VP Marketing) As a 4 th year electronic engineering student, Joseph has a strong interest and skills in software design, project debugging and problem solving. He has completed projects such as designing embedded system with C, and designing a virtual drum machine on Xilinx Virtex 2 Pro(XUPV2P) development board(advanced Digital System Design course in SFU), where he played the software role in the team(using C). He had also audited course relates to internet protocols and video processing. His other projects include programming on FPGA using assembly language, and various coding projects using C/C Conclusion HelperTech is eager to provide convenient engineering methods and solution to general public. Our first product, snow blower robot - RoboBlow, will provide the best and marketable solution to snow removal compared to the existing product. RoboBlow provides the possibility of removing snow outdoor while the user controls the robot indoor with comfort. With our thoroughly planed project schedule, budget and funding, and talented members, our project will be completed successfully as planned. 15

18 11. References 1) House-snow 2) Robot snowblower 3) Remote controller 4) Statistics for heart diseases per year 5) Heart diseases associated with snow shovelling &ct= ) Baby boom aging 7) Snow Removal (Wiki) 16