Lockheed Martin Internship
Scooter Project
In my summer 2022 internship at Lockheed Martin, I developed a procedure to reliably track packages as they were delivered from one location to another, enabled multiple packages to be delivered in one trip, and created an algorithm that would plan routes according to the priority level of the packages on board.
This project was born out of my coworker's frustration with the current procedure in place, which was established in order to ensure packages did not end up in the wrong place. Employees in the distribution center could load several packages at a time onto the delivery robot, called "Scooter," so long as all the packages were headed to the same destination. If multiple packages had to be delivered to different locations, the established practice was to make a seperate delivery to each location. This was done to ensure packages were not recieved at the wrong location.
Once Scooter arrived at it's destination, employees would unload the packages and send Scooter back to the distribution center, where the process would repeat. Sometimes, employees would unload the packages, but forget to send Scooter back to the distrbution center. This frustrated the distribution center because they were not allowed to reroute Scooter back to them. The site had a rule that allowed employees to reroute Scooter to another location only if they already had possession of Scooter. This rule was established to avoid rerouting Scooter to the distribution center before individuals at the destination could unload their packages from it.
"Scooter" was a package delivery robot similar to this.
Solution and Experience
I spent my first month at Lockheed Martin onboarding and working alongside the manufacturing engineers. Throughout the first month, I was simultaneously trying to identify a project I could tackle on my own that would be both meaningful and intellectually challenging.
Early into my second month, I realized I wanted to give Scooter an upgrade and solve the issues mentioned above. I spent the first week interviewing users, identifying the core issues, and brainstorming solutions. I explained my ideas to my supervisors and Scooter's regular users. Their feedback enabled me to iterate and arrive at the final solution. I accomplished the following with only a week left in my internship.
I programmed a RaspberryPi to interface with a barcode scanner and Scooter. I created barcodes that corresponded to all the main delivery locations. A user could stick a barcode onto a package, scan the package onto Scooter, and record that the package had left the distribution center via Scooter to its destination. An employee at the destination could scan the packages, marking them "delivired via Scooter."
The script on the RaspberryPi could recognize that all the packages belonging to a destination had been scanned out, confirm that packages were still loaded on Scooter, and automatically route Scooter to the next location. I called this system a "Virtual Queue."
I created barcodes that marked a package's priority level. Then designed an algorithm that would plan routes based on the "hottest" item in the queue. Packages sitting on Scooter throughout the day would automatically rise in priority level to ensure they were delivered in a timely manner.
The distribution center could now reliably track packages as they were delivered from one location to another, load multiple packages assigned to different locations onto Scooter, and ensure the highest priority items would be delivered the soonest.