DROX

Inspiration

As Engineers we are always interested in implementing technology into our daily lives. Apart from being Engineers we all identify ourselves as foodies, so the idea of a food delivery robot was really something that spoke to us. we had seen food delivery drones and food delivery robots and we decided to just get the best of both the worlds in one place and that is exactly what we did.

What it does

The idea behind DROX was to build a comprehensive and easy to interact with multi-terrain food delivery system that uses mobile docks which hold the food and deploy the drones which carry the food to the client in an easy and seamless manner. The use of multiple docks and multiple drones gives us endless possibilities for faster delivery and better optimization of the travel paths. Using shortest path algorithms and supply chain optimizations we can optimize DROX in a city environment to handle multiple hosts(restaurants/takeout eateries) and multiple clients in the fastest and most efficient way possible.

The docks are self-sustaining robots with a storage capacity of 12 ft3 and can navigate through a myriad of landscapes, they also act as charging stations for the drones making the whole system low maintenance. What sets DROX apart from other food delivery robots is that it is modular in nature and can use drones to travel over the terrains the docking station can’t. It's a perfect blend of mobility, safety and efficiency for the food delivery industry. The idea behind DROX is not to remove the human factor from the industry but to make the interaction of humans with the robots much more intuitive and make the whole process faster and more comfortable.

How we built it

Building DROX was a 3 tier challenge where we had three main functional parts that were the docking robot, the drone and the cargo hold. We built all three part separately and collaborated later in the design process. The idea was to get the docking robot to hold the drone and cargo and seamlessly deliver the food.

Challenges we ran into

Getting all parts to fit while trying to keep it under a certain volume to keep it ergonomically sound and aesthetically friendly was a challenge that we spent a lot of our time on. Trying to integrate technology in a service environment is difficult as it is, so one of our top priorities was to get the user interaction to be as easy and natural as possible, and that was a very genuine challenge that made us try multiple iterations of our design to be as user friendly as possible.

What's next for DROX

As a team we feel DROX is an innovation which is essential and also inevitable. We want to grow this idea further and help optimize this process of food delivery as much as possible, to reduce human effort and provide a level of comfort and sense of security to people who order their food to be delivered. If and when this idea takes off, we would like to gather user data and try to make the whole process better and further optimized. (yeah we're kind of efficiency junkies)

Built With

• autodesk-fusion-360
• canva
• docs
• maps