PRE2019 4 Group5
Group members
| Name | Student number | Study |
|---|---|---|
| Danielle Paige Gillam | 1227637 | Psychology & Technology (ICT) |
| Lucia Kalkman | 1335529 | Electrical Engineering |
| Annemijn Cissy van der Lande | 1239822 | Psychology & Technology (Robotics) |
| Dajt Mullaj | 1286722 | Computer Science |
| Fabiènne Pascalle van der Weide | 1004980 | Psychology & Technology (ICT) |
Introduction
Problem Statement
As stated in the introduction many autonomous delivery robots currently exist or are being tested. In face of the 2020 Covid-19 epidemic the need of efficient delivery systems of goods and essentials has become even more important. Furthermore the introduction of social distancing laws across the world brings to the front line the autonomous systems described in the introduction. In this project we will explore how to implement a system of autonomous robots for the delivery of medicine and goods to the elderly and sick people. The system could then be used in hospitals to help the staff with intensive care units and for deliveries from pharmacies directly to houses or elderly homes. To sustain an efficient delivery scheme the project will develop a prototype for a multi compartment robot. Each compartment will contain medicine for a specific delivery, so that in a single trip the robot will visit multiple houses or contain all the drugs for each elder of an elderly home. The prototype will therefore be composed of two main parts, each solving a main problem of implementing delivery robots for medicines. The first part will be a software demonstrating the navigation system of a robot that needs to visit multiple houses before coming back to the pharmacy for the next delivery. The software will be written in NetLogo, a programming language and IDE for modeling agent-based environments. The second part of the prototype will consist in demonstrating the robot’s multi compartment system. To do that an app, written in Swift, will be developed and hardware representing a robot with more compartments will be assembled. The app will have an option to log in as a user or as a pharmacist/caretaker. The robot will have levers mimicking compartments opening or closing and a board to take inputs. As a user you will be able to order medicine through the app, which in turn will display a password to type on the robot’s board. When such action is performed the correct compartment containing the requested medicine will open. The project, moreover, takes into consideration that smartphones are not popular with the elderly. Therefore the latter or the caretaker assigned to an arbitrary elderly home can enter in contact with a pharmacist either by physically going to the pharmacy or by digital means, like with an email, and create a subscription for a delivery plan. They will then receive from the pharmacist a password, and on each delivery the pharmacist will furnish the robot and logging in the app will set the password for the specific compartment to the one agreed upon when the subscription was initiated. The project, as specified before, could also be used to perform deliveries within the hospital's ground in order to prevent the spread of infectious diseases among the healthcare staff.
Objectives
- Research the state of the art of the current autonomous delivery robots.
- Understand the requirements for delivery robots in the medical field.
- Design and implement a navigation system for autonomous delivery robots that finds the shortest path across multiple targets.
- Design and implement a multicompartment system that can lock each compartment by means of a password and communicates with an external application to set said passwords. - Test both systems to understand their limitations and improve their functionalities.
State of the Art
Reference test [1]
Stakeholders
There are a number of different stakeholders when it comes to the field of medical delivery robots. Here the main stakeholders within the scopes of users, society and enterprise will be presented and discussed.
Users
The primary users of medical delivery robots are those who directly interact with the robot. Therefore sick or elderly people who require medicine deliveries will fall into this category. These patients will have to have sufficient understanding of how to interact with the robots and respective applications. Pharmacists and nurses will also be considered primary users as they will have to interact with the robot in order to fill it with sufficient supplies for respective patients and understand the operation of the application and robot. These users will be considered the most in the design process as they will use the robot for it's purpose, and so interface design choices as well as technical design choices will be made in order to best accommodate these users.
Society
Within society there are a number of stakeholders, the first being the Government. The Government are responsible for laws and regulations regarding the medical delivery robots, this includes traffic regulations as well as ethical laws.
The second stakeholder that is a part of the societal perspective is nurses caretakers and doctors. As well as being direct users of the robots in terms of stocking them with medicine, the medical delivery robots impact them in a less direct manner too. For example in the midst of a pandemic or an outbreak of disease, the fact that these health care workers are able to send a delivery robot to infected patients means that they reduce the risk of being infected themselves. Hospitals themselves are also stakeholders and due to the fact that hospitals are commonly hotspots for these outbreaks the reduction of infection of their staff will help prevent understaffing. The reduction of the spread of disease will additionally help society as a whole as well as reducing stress on governments.
The final societal stakeholders are people who encounter the medical delivery robots on the streets while they are performing their delivery or pick-up tasks. These individuals play an important role in the fabrication of laws and regulations as their lives will be affected by the robots without any direct gain from them. For example the possibility of disruption in pedestrian traffic or even the vandalisation of the robots will motivate respective regulations. In order to gain this stakeholder perspective a survey will be performed in order to gain insight from these stakeholders and their attitudes towards delivery robots.
Enterprise
Within the scope of Enterprise the main stakeholders are the technical companies which are developing the medical delivery robots as well as the hospitals and pharmacies with which they are partnered.
Approach
To achieve the objectives of the project five main parts of the development process have been defined: research, requirements analysis, specification analysis, implementation and testing. To better tackle each phase regular group meetings every week have been set. During these meetings the tasks for the current development processes phase are assigned to each team member.
Group organization
Each week a different group member occupies the position of chairperson. The responsibility of the chairperson is to establish an agenda before the meeting and mediate the discussion through the topics that are set in the agenda. Furthermore the chairperson must take the minutes of every meeting during that week and act as a representative of the group during the tutor meeting. The chairperson role rotates through the members in the team.
| Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4 | Week 5 | Week 6 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mijntje | Dajt | Danielle | Fabiènne | Lucia | Mijntje |
Development process
The first phase of the development processes of the project is the research. During the latter the literature is consulted to establish the state of the art. Moreover the problem statement is specified and the different stakeholders are analysed. A comprehensive plan is set to fix the deadlines of the other phases.
The second phase is the requirements analysis. This is a fundamental step of the development processes as the requirements will define the functionality of the project. A cost-benefit and risk assessment analysis will cover the requirements for every part of the project. The ethical evaluation will focus on the requirements for the application and the compartment system prototype, while the survey will focus on the requirements for the navigation simulation.
The third phase of the development processes is the specification analysis. During this phase the requirements are formalized using UML diagrams. The design of the user interface of the app is defined and the hypothetical maps that the delivery robots must navigate are designed in NetLogo.
The fourth phase is the implementation. The application code is written in Swift, creating an app compatible with devices supporting iOS, the hardware for the compartment system is assembled and the NetLogo program for the delivery simulation is written.
During the fifth and final phase of the development process the system is tested and a demo is finally created.
Planning
From the approach a plan for the development process was created. The plan is illustrated in the following figure using a Gantt table.
Task Division
During each development process phase the different task composing it are subdivided between the group members.
| Research | Requirements | Specification | Implementation | Testing | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Task | Group member | Task | Group member | Task | Group member | Task | Group member | Task | Group member | ||||
| Determining subject | All | Risk Assessment | ... | App Users | ... | App User | ... | Test system | ... | ||||
| Set up Wiki | Fabiènne | Cost-Benefit Analysis | ... | App enterprise | ... | App enterprise | ... | Make demo video | ... | ||||
| Approach | Dajt | Ethical perspective | ... | Robot compartment system | ... | Robot compartment system | ... | Update Wiki | ... | ||||
| Planning | Fabiènne, Dajt | Make survey | ... | Navigation | ... | Navigation system | ... | ||||||
| Literature search | All | Analyse data survey | ... | Update Wiki | ... | Update Wiki | ... | ||||||
| Introduction | Lucia, Mijntje, Fabiènne | Update Wiki | ... | ||||||||||
| State of the Art | Lucia, Mijntje, Fabiènne | ||||||||||||
| Stakeholder analysis | Danielle | ||||||||||||
| Update Wiki | Danielle, Fabiènne, Dajt | ||||||||||||
Milestones
End week 2: Complete problem statement, introduction and state of the art
End week 3: Survey on people’s attitudes towards our proposal and delivery robots in general
End week 4: Analysis/conclusions of the survey and a theoretical set-up of our system
End week 6: The first version of the apps and lock system
End week 7: The adjusted version of the apps (after testing/interviewing) and a demo video
Deliverables
The final product will be a system to distribute/deliver medicine to those in need (elderly in most cases), including:
- An app for the user to order medicine and open the compartment of the delivery robot
- An app for the pharmacist/hospital/doctor/distributer
- An app for the robot with navigation function
- A system to secure and open the compartments
Logbook
Week 1
| Name | Total hours | Tasks |
|---|---|---|
| Danielle | 0.5 | Meeting [0.5], literature research (source 5-11) [1] |
| Lucia | 0.5 | Meeting [0.5], |
| Mijntje | 0.5 | Meeting [0.5], |
| Dajt | 0.5 | Meeting [0.5], |
| Fabiènne | 2 | Meeting [0.5], literature research (source 1-4) [1], Wiki page [0.5] |
Week 2
| Name | Total hours | Tasks |
|---|---|---|
| Danielle | ||
| Lucia | ||
| Mijntje | ||
| Dajt | ||
| Fabiènne |
Week 3
| Name | Total hours | Tasks |
|---|---|---|
| Danielle | ||
| Lucia | ||
| Mijntje | ||
| Dajt | ||
| Fabiènne |