AUTEAMATION

AuTEAmation is our course 30.007 Engineering Innovation Design project. And this project is reserved by SUTD EPD pillar for future exhibitions. The topic of this design course is the smart city. Based on this, we designed AuTEAmation, a fully automatic bubble tea vending machine which can roam in the shopping mall.

Quick Review:

Prototype Video

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Fast-moving food and beverage goods such as bubble tea have tedious processes, are highly manpower dependent and face fluctuations in business throughout the day.

To better address the up and coming market of fast-moving food and beverage goods like bubble tea, the aim is to design a product that will redefine the concept of a traditional store by creating a store that roams to areas of high crowd density. The vision if for the product to be a fleet of moving stores, each working on 1 level in a mall or outdoors and requiring only 1 maintenance staff to clean and refill the robot.

Product features

- Smart Roaming

The product is able to constantly position itself at areas of high crowd density. It utilizes existing CCTV cameras infrastructure located in the mall to capture images. These images are processed using OpenCV program to detect the number of people in the image. It will also compare the crowd density between locations and identify the highest crowd number among the different locations represented by where each CCTV camera is pointing at. The information is relayed to the roaming robot via cloud where it will then move along a line that is laid out by the bubble tea store so that the product is able to roam along a fixed path and will always be within the boundaries that it should follow. These boundaries could be set by the bubble tea store or mall owners. The product is able to identify its current location via scanning QR code on the ground. These QR codes correspond to the locations of the CCTV cameras and can also be scanned by customers should they want to know more information on the product. The product is also built-in with sensors to avoid colliding with obstacles or to detect customers should they want to purchase bubble tea while the product is moving to the area of highest crowd density.

- Compact Refrigeration Capability

The onboard and portable refrigeration unit is designed to be power efficient and lightweight. It uses a hybrid cooling system to keep ingredients (milk and tea) at low temperature (9°C), ensuring the quality of the product. It utilizes a Peltier and water cooling system coupled with cooling gel to maintain the temperature. Such a system is essential to able to distribute the product while roaming between areas.

- Fully Autonomous Dispenser

The dispenser unit is designed to be 100% autonomous with no manpower required to operate. It allows users to customize their drink option and bubble tea is dispensed through a 3-step motion on the robot. The interaction between the user and robot for ordering is done through the use of a touch screen. The robot calibrates the volumes of the toppings and drinks to ensure that the same volume is dispensed each time and that there is no overflow in volume. Through automation, serving time and manpower can be significantly reduced.

Challenges

Our teams biggest challenge was our lack of experience. The theme for this project was Smart Cities and most of our team was not too strong in coding or electronics which would be critical for the project. But we decided to take things one step at a time and use this project as an opportunity for us to learn new skills. As we developed and constructed our project, we had to read and acquire new knowledge at each step of the way. On multiple occasions, we had to rush out of campus to purchase additional electronic parts which we did not know we needed or had to replace mechanical parts that had broken due to our inexperience with working on a project that had to undergo such large forces. It was a tough few weeks of failing and rebuilding. We even worked overnight without sleep to troubleshoot the product before our final presentation. It took much more than we expected to get our prototype working. But overall, we are glad to have had this experience. We have grown a lot as individuals and as a team and we will always have the satisfaction in knowing that our efforts led to the product being fully functional.