Material Bank Presentation

Early of December 2021, a representative of our title sponsor, Material Bank, came to one of our meetings to teach the team about the application of robots in modern businesses. She mentioned two types of robots in particular during this demonstration. The first one was a robot to help tell humans what products to take off of shelves. Material Bank has thousands of different products, so this helps quicken the process. These robots have space for the humans to put the products, as well as sensors that can tell the human if the product that they grabbed is correct. These robots can also detect which individual employee they are approaching and change the language that their display screen uses to prevent miscommunications. The second type of robot is one that is designed to move bulk amounts of product around the warehouse. This is similar to this year’s FTC challenge, and this inspired some thought for our strategy this year. These robots also use the same mecanum wheels we do. Overall, these robots increase the efficiency of the warehouse interactions for Material Bank by a large amount.

During this outreach, we gained some ideas about functioning in this year’s FTC challenge. We learned how to apply our experience in robotics in real life, and we learned how humans interact with robots in a workplace. We, as a robotics team, hope to make these interactions as smooth as possible and are learning how to do so during this First FTC game season.