Problem Statement
Employees and students often go there to hangout with friends and colleagues, study or to complete some work while they eat. We want to tackle the issue of the huge amount of time that is wasted in self service. We want the customers to not waste the time in waiting for the food at the counter.
Another key issue felt by a lot of restaurant owners is the acquisition and training of quality staff, so as to build a good image from the customer’s perspective. We found that the perception of a restaurant can take a turn for the worse with a few misplaced words from staff.
Research
We performed an extensive case study in the canteen, Which revealed that indeed a lot of hours during the day are wasted when we collectively see the time that people spend on the counter, waiting for their order to get prepared. We future did a literature review and looked for existing products if any, and what are the things that we can do to improve it.
Of the automated solutions existing today, the majority of them bear a strong resemblance to humans in their physical appearance. These solutions elicit uncanny, or strangely familiar, feelings of eeriness and revulsion in observers resulting in a decreased affinity towards these objects. We would like to build both a solution which is functionally sound as well as aesthetically appealing.We decided to make a robot whose primary focus would be to deliver food straight to the table.
Most customers these days demonstrate a huge and increasing appetite for self-service. Maybe it’s the efficiency of the interaction. For example the airport kiosk is faster than interacting with a check-in agent. On a psychological level, it might have more to do with the unique element of control that self service affords. This can be directly correlated to the growth in man-machine interaction over a purely human-human interaction. Thus automating the task of service at restaurants will help drive efficiency in ordering and receiving their desired foods. So we decided to come up with a web app, where the users can order the food straight from the app.
Solution Designed
BB-W8 uses graph algorithms to determine the best possible path to get the food to the required table.
It detects grid-lines on the floor to help it re-calibrate and verify its position from time to time. It uses a multitude of ultrasonic sensors to prevent collisions with objects in its path and help try navigate around them.
At its heart it uses a raspberry pi 3 for all its communications and processing.
This bot can be deployed across a range of restaurants helping tackling the problem of finding quality and reliable staff as well as eliminating the need for people to wait at counters of self service restaurants.
Challenges Faced
1) Integrating a database system to manage the orders. (this was done by learning firebase)
2) Designing an algorithm to work on the grid system from scratch.
3) Setting up a payment system.
4) Writing all this cause I'm not particularly good at writing stuff.