Portolio of David Elkan-Gonzalez
Senior Capstone Project in Engineering
Position: Student Researcher
When: September 2014 - May 2015
Key Skills: Design, Research, Human Robot Collabortation, Software Development
SCOPE is Olin's Senior Capstone Project in Engineering. Companies pay to hire teams of students to work on a project that is of benefit to the company. For the duration of the year each of these teams works for a portion each week on this project. Our team of 5 worked on behalf of Rockwell Automation to investigate human robot collaboration in the factory of the future. Unfortunately this project is covered by a pretty substantial NDA, but here's a description of what we worked on that has been approved for public disemination.
The student members of our scope team, as well as faculty adviser and our sponsor company.
Incorporating versatile robots in industrial environments has been gaining more and more traction. As a response, many companies in this industry are working to better integrate human and robot work flows to achieve a high level of collaboration on manufacturing tasks. The barriers between the state of automation right now and a highly collaborative state of automation boil down to two main factors: technical and human considerations. Industrial robots must avoid harming humans, and the humans that are working with them must also perceive them as safe. We worked with Rockwell Automation to make the vision of a highly-automated Factory of the Future into a reality by addressing the human factors inherent in such an environment.
To meet this challenge our team embarked on a quest of design and investigation from the ground up. We pulled up every resource on the subject matter we could find, and sought out members of our target user group. We visited locations in several different states and as far apart as Massachusetts and California to gain insight on our task. This data was compiled using personas, storyboards, co-designs, and thorough ideation. With this information we developed set of proposals, which we then presented to Rockwell Automation. From these proposals we selected the most promising idea and created a prototype as developed the idea further. This prototype recieved excellent feedback from the Rockwell Automation team.