TMZlin EV3 2015 (Simulation of logistic distribution processes through intelligent robotic components)

The goal of this project is to create and develop technical promotional material for the Faculty of Applied Informatics at the Tomas Bata University in Zlín. With this promotional material the university is going to different info sessions to show the capabilities of the Faculty of Applied Informatics to attract future students.

Category: webdesign

Client

Our task is to create a plug-and-play project which shows these capabilities, but is easy to set-up and does not require the end-user to read a complete manual before operating it. For this promotional material we have chosen to work with the Lego Mindstorms EV3 Robots to develop and build a factory based project. During this project three Lego EV3 Robots will be programmed in order to create an order pick-up, sorting and delivery system. A user will go to our product website to order a product. This order is stored into our database. One robot will accept the order and deliver the materials to a sorting robot which will use colour sensors to scan the items. The last robot will drive autonomously to a delivery point where the user can pick up their order. During different procedural steps the user will be informed by our mailing system and our administrators will notified when something is wrong with the robots.

Tomas Bata – Factulty of Applied Informatics – Together with three other Belgian colleagues, we did our internship in Zlín, Czech Republic. There we received an assignment to create a “Simulation of logistic distribution processes through intelligent robotic components”. Meaning that we would need to analyse and build a simulation where in we could test the intelligence of robotic components in a logistic distribution process.

Tasks

Since this was a three month bachelor project, there were many tasks to be completed.

One of them was creating a responsive “product order” website and an “administration website”. This website contains functionalities to order products and also contains enough possibilities for administrators and operators to find out what is wrong with the hardware.

The following features were integrated:

• Product order
• Robotic hardware logging
• Order following
• User and content management and registration
• E-mail notifications

My other colleagues were responsible for the redundant hardware and High Availability of the web and processing services. And one colleague was our main Python developer, creating the communication scripts between our SQL Database and the Lego Mindstorm EV3 Robots