Re: ENSC Project Proposal for Remote Control Snow Blower Robotwhitmore/courses/ensc305/projects/2011/6prop.pdf · Re: ENSC Project Proposal for Remote Control Snow Blower Robot Dear

HelperTech.

School of Engineering Science, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6

January 25, 2010

Dr. Andrew Rawicz

School of Engineering Science

Simon Fraser University

Burnaby, BC

V5A 1S6

Re: ENSC Project Proposal for Remote Control Snow Blower Robot

Dear Dr. Rawicz:

The enclosed document, Proposal for Remote Control Snow Blower Robot, clearly describes

our project for the ENSC440 Capstone Project. The team of HelperTech is proposing this

project to build a robot called RoboBlow that allows people to clean snow outdoor by remote

controlling a robot without the necessity of going out the house in person.

Our proposal provides an overview of the project which consists of: possible design

solutions and information, estimated cost and funding, tentative project schedule, and

team description and organization. Further it briefly discusses the market strategies of the

project and the robot.

HelperTech is a research team found by four talented and innovative senior engineering

students: Leo Cheng, Peter Hsiao, Joseph Shen, and YuYuan Liu. If there are any questions

or concerns regarding our proposal, please feel free to contact me by phone or by email.

Sincerely,

Leo Cheng

President and CEO, HelperTech

Phone: (604) 760-1283

Email: [email protected]

Enclosure: Proposal for Remote Control Snow Blower Robot

Project Proposal

Remote Control Snow Blower Robot Spring 2011

Submitted to: Andrew Rawicz (ENSC 440)

Michael Sjoerdsma (ENSC 305)

Project Team: Leo Cheng (301084573)

Peter Hsiao (301025638)

YuYuan Liu (301046236)

Joseph Shen (301032167)

Proposal for Remote Control Snow Blower Robot

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Exective Summary Have you ever imagined that after a snow storm in a cold winter day, you can just sit on

your coach, enjoying a cup of hot chocolate and watching your favorite TV program

without worrying about the snow sitting on the sidewalk? Have you ever hoped that you

can just wake up like any other day, open your garage and begin a wonderful day without

the pain of removing the snow piled up on your driveway? For people like us living in the

northern countries with snowy winter, we believe the answer would be yes.

This is why HelperTech would like to provide a solution by introducing our revolutionary

product, the RoboBlow. The idea behind RoboBlow is very simple:

To prevent people from exposing to hazardous weather condition during the winter

So, when it snows, we can just stay inside our warm comfy home and remotely control

this user friendly little helper to remove the snow.

The concept of RoboBlow is essentially the same as snow throwers that are already

popular among snow removing tools and available on the markets. However, by

robotizing this already existing product, we can immediately see the advantages of the

combination. Not only the device can be controlled wirelessly, but it can also be

self-guided as an option to save people some time in busy mornings for example. We can

add features like cameras to provide users with instant feedback of what the robot is

doing and the status of the robot. We can also add a salt spraying unit to the robot to

prevent the forming of black ice after snow has been removed.

HelperTech consists of four senior engineering students with decent backgrounds and

training in the disciplines of electronics and systems engineering. We are always

passionate about problem solving and looking for ways that would provide convenience

and help people with everyday life. This project is multi-disciplined and will require the

knowledge of embedded software programming, control system with motors and sensors,

power electronics, communications, and mechanical engineering.

The development process of this project will take approximately ten consecutive weeks. We

plan to test out the prototype system by the middle of March, and present it during the

second week of April. The potential funding source for this project would be the SFU

Engineering Student Society and we will also look for other interested partners in the future.


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Table of Contents

Exective Summary .............................................................................................................. 1

1. Introduction ................................................................................................................. 3

2. System Overview ........................................................................................................ 4

3. Possible Design Solutions ........................................................................................... 6

3.1 Snow Shovel & Ice Pick ....................................................................................... 6

3.2 Anti-icing Chemicals ............................................................................................ 6

3.3 Snow Clearing Vehicles ........................................................................................ 6

3.4 Snow Blower ......................................................................................................... 7

4. Proposed Design Solution ........................................................................................... 7

4.1 Benefit to Society .................................................................................................. 7

4.2 Market Plan and Consideration ............................................................................. 8

5. Possible Sources of Information ............................................................................... 10

6. Budget and Funding .................................................................................................. 11

7. Schedule .................................................................................................................... 12

8. Team Organization & Group Dynamics ................................................................... 12

9. Company Profile ....................................................................................................... 14

10. Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 15

11. References ................................................................................................................. 16


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1. Introduction

According to Heart & Stroke foundation of Canada, there are approximately 70,000 heart

attacks and 50,000 strokes each year in Canada which account for two of the three

leading diseases that result death. From the same website, it also indicates that snow

shoveling in extreme cold weather has a great impact on the cause of heart failures.

Of course, snow shoveling is just one of the many factors that causes heart failures.

However heart diseases are not the only risk associated with snow removing, just

consider injuries and accidents that might happen by walking on driveways and sidewalks

with slippery surface. With the aging of baby boomers who attribute to one third of the

population in Canada as indicated by CBC news, the issues of how to provide a safety

and comfort living environment for this aging population have become an important

concern in the recent years. Therefore, we believe by introducing products like

RoboBlow would help preventing people especially seniors or people with disability from

exposing to hazardous environment in everyday live.

The control of RoboBlow for snow removal is accomplished by using a remote controller

which allows the user to just stay indoors and operate the device. There are cameras

installed on the robot so the user is able to monitor the operation and the status of the

robot by watching the instant video from the LCD screen on the wireless controller.

Through the controller, the user can control the speed and the direction of the robot. The

user is able to turn on/off the blower and change the direction of blowing so the unwanted

snow can be shot in desired orientation. With a salt spraying unit mounted on the robot,

the user is able turn on/off the feature through the remote controller as well. Self-guided

mechanism might also be implemented into RoboBlow so the user does not have to spend

time monitoring the robot. However, due to the complexity of the system and time

limitations, we might not be able to construct this module to our project at the moment.

This proposal will first discuss about the system overview and design solutions of our

robotic blower. Team organization and company profile sections are then followed to


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indicate the backgrounds and experience of each member and the duties assigned to each

of us. Also, administrative issues such as funding and scheduling are briefly mentioned in

order to help us managing our budgets and timing. Finally, a conclusion is provided to

summarize our proposal.

2. System Overview

The RoboBlow works as demonstrated in figures 1. Suppose there was a heavy snow and

right now the householder is about to use the robot to clean up the snow in the yard. The

householder could just sit inside the house to control the robot by using the remote

controller. The screen on the remote controller will display the real-time video captured

by the cameras on the robot. In this way, the householder will easily know the location of

the robot and issue the proper command.

Figure 1: Overall System Diagram


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The block diagram in Figure 2 describes how this whole process works. This product will

use two MCUs to provide the capability of remote control and robot control. One MCU

(MCU1) will be in the remote controller while the other (MCU2) will be placed inside the

robot. Once the householder press any buttons on the control panel, MCU1 will process

the signal and send it to MCU2 inside the robot wirelessly. After receiving this signal,

MCU2 will process it and send it to the mechanical parts which will implement the

corresponding actions. Note that our product not only provides the snow thrower function

but also provides salt spraying.

Figure 2: System Block Diagram


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3. Possible Design Solutions

There are many existing methods for snow removal. Still it doesn’t seem to have an

effective and convenient solution to remove snow and ice on sidewalk, and usually

people need to remove snow manually outdoors. See below common methods for snow

removal.

3.1 Snow Shovel & Ice Pick

Using snow shovel and ice pick is probably the most common and simple method for

snow removal by individual. People use snow shovel to push and lift snow off the road or

sidewalk and use ice pick to break ice on the ground. However, removing snow by person

with these tools is a considerable hard exercise which requires a lot of time and effort.

3.2 Anti-icing Chemicals

Spraying chemical on snow or ice can be an effective solution for snow removal depends

on the working environment. The most common example is salt as it is cheap and the

freezing point of salt water is less than 0 °C. However, salt does not function to malt ice

and snow if the temperature is lower than the freezing point of salt water. Some other

organic compounds and liquid chemical have also been developed to melt snow and ice.

Still, using chemicals may cause environmental issue and the chemicals are not reusable.

3.3 Snow Clearing Vehicles

Snow clearing vehicles is like a big truck that pushes snow aside or off the road. Some

snow clearing vehicles may also spray anti-icing chemicals on the road or carry huge

amount of snow away instead of pushing it aside the road. However, it is usually done by

government when huge snow fall occurs, and it usually does not remove snow off the

sidewalk.


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3.4 Snow Blower

Snow blower is a machine to help removing snow by throwing or blowing snow and ice

away. It could be like a small vehicles or even a smaller machine that can be used by a

single person. For its small size, it can be used not only on roadway but also in sidewalk.

The only disadvantage of using this method is that it may be expensive to purchase the

machine and the user still needs to expose to freezing temperature outdoor.

4. Proposed Design Solution

Our proposed design solution is targeting to the normal family. Our product is a snow

blower robot with two innovative characters.

Firstly, people can do the remote control without keeping watching the robot. The

controller itself has a high quality LCD screen that can display the real-time HD video

captured by the camera from the robot. In order to guarantee the video quality, the video

data is further processed by a new coding technology owned by Dr. Jie Liang. So by

watching that video, you will feel like you are just directly monitoring the robot outside.

Secondly, the working routine of the robot can be pre-programmed. Imagining that:

The householder can just press some buttons on the robot and drink some coffees or enjoy

the TV show at home. After one or two hours when the robot finishes the job, the yard is

all cleaned up and the robot has already stopped at storage room automatically.

By using pre-programmed function in our product, you will be that person! It is an

intelligent slave for you!

4.1 Benefit to Society

This product is able to provide huge benefits to the family and society. It can provide the

significant convenience to the family.


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In winter, shoveling snow is a very tough job. People have to spend couple of hours

working under the hazardous cold weather. If the snow is heavy, it can even take longer

time. By using the RoboBlow, people can either control the robot inside the house or

pre-program the working routine, and the robot will do all the things left for householders.

In this way, people can save those couple of hours to do whatever they want.

This product can also prevent unnecessary injuries caused by shoveling snow manually.

Shoveling snow outside requires the worker to use some solid and sharp tools such as

shovel and to deal with the slippery road condition. Any occurrence of small mistakes

could make the worker injured. However, our product frees the workers from working

outside; instead, they just need to stay inside the house. Thus, comparing with the

traditional way, working inside highly decreases the possibility of related injury

occurrence.

Moreover, this product could assist the seniors and disabled people to clean up the snow

in the yard. The heavy physical work will be done by the robot; all the seniors and

disabled people need to do is to play around with the controller which is physically

allowable for most of them.

Comparing with other existing snow cleanup product in the market, ours is the only one

that can 100% free the workers from such heavy physical labor. In addition, it saves a lot

of valuable time for the workers. The most original snow cleanup product is just a shovel,

which requires a lot of time and heavy physical labor from the workers. The better one is

an automatic snow thrower, but it still needs human force to move it when it is working.

Unlike the shovel, it decreases the intensity of work, but people still need to drive the

machine under the cold weather. Our product only needs people to sit inside the warm

house and wait for the robot finishing the job. If you want, you can monitor and control

the robot by remote controller. Life becomes such easy!

4.2 Market Plan and Consideration

In order to take up the market as early as possible, we have made a very comprehensive

plan to develop this product in the shortest developing cycle while keeping the good

product quality. The whole product development will have three phases. The product

developed by each phase is ready for customer purchases. In this way, we can keep the


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healthy fund-chain, so that the development of next phase will have enough funding.

Each phase and its important features are listed below:

Phase 1 product:

The robot can be remotely controlled to clean up the snow. The real-time images captured

by the camera on the robot can be displayed on the LCD screen on the remote controller.

Phase 2 product:

The working routine can be pre-programmed by the user. Artificial Intelligence will be

built in the robot. More advanced mechanical system will replace the original one to

adapt different terrain.

Phase 3 product:

More artificial intelligence will be built in. Fix bugs.

The designate development period for each phase is about 3 months. However, as we

only have no more than 13 weeks to develop the product, we will only focus on phase 1.

In other words, after 13 weeks, phase1 product will be ready for the market.

Besides time limitation, we also have other constraints to be confronted with. They are

funding and component purchases. We do not have too much funding for this project, but

we agreed that each person in the company will share the development cost.

We will also try our best to save the cost. For component purchases, we are not very

familiar with the location of purchases for industry components. However, this problem

should not be difficult to solve, either we can ask professors in the school or search online.

Another potential problem that might slow down our development process is the

component shipment time. Fortunately, we have already anticipated this problem and

finished the first cycle component purchase. The components are expected to be arrived

around Jan 27th

.

In summary, this product has a huge potential market. It is better than any other existing

snow removal product in the market. We will use the least amount of time to develop a

mature product for the market. Three phases strategy will provide us a stable fund-chain

for the further development.


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5. Possible Sources of Information

For this project, we have many connections that we can get valuable information from.

First of all, our ENSC friends had also done ENSC440 Capstone Project about creating a

robot before, for instance: Jason Tsai, Steven Choi, and Sean Feng. They are experts on

hardware connection and software implementation and are personally close friends with

us. It is the most convenient for us to ask them for help whenever we have questions.

Secondly, the experts from SFU ENSC faculty, Professor Lucky and Professor Patrick,

may also provide advice to our project. Most of our team members are taking ENSC 425

with Lucky and we frequently ask him for help. He is eager to help students with project

and is very reliable for our hardware consideration. Professor Patrick is an expert on

motors. We asked him for advice when choosing the parts for our projects. He has gaven

decent advice about what parts we should choose, what we should consider, and what we

might not want to do. It would have been a lot more difficult without his help.

Furthermore, much of our help could come from our group’s family. One of our members,

YuYuan Liu’s father is a professional engineer in the industry. His expertise is on the

MCU control and wireless communication. We can get so much valuable information

from him.

Lastly, the owner of LEE’s ELECTRONICS has also provided us valuable information

regarding the parts we are buying for the project.

Of course, there are also many valuable sources of information can be found in the

internet for our project.


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6. Budget and Funding

This is a considerably expensive project to build. The most significant part of our money

will be spent on the snow thrower. Also we choose to use higher level microcontrollers as

we need to run video processing and wireless communication and other processes

simultaneously.

See below table for the list of component and estimated cost of the project:

Table 1: Equipment List and Estimated Cost

Equipment List Estimated Unit Cost

Yardworks 9A / 16-in Electric Snow Thrower $170

Motomaster Utility Battery x 2 $120

DC motors x 4 + Drive axles, gears, etc $300

Robot body (Acrylic board from Industrial Plastic and Paint) $100

Motomaster Eliminator Intelligent Battery Charger 12/8/2A $100

MCU x 2 $200

Camera x 4 $200

Electronic components for remote controller +

Electronic component for robot control $120

Total Cost $1310

We have applied for the Engineering Science Student Endowment Fund provided by

ESSS and the Wighton Development Fund. Further funding source might also be

considered. Otherwise we will cover the rest cost ourselves.


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7. Schedule

Below is a Time Line Gantt Chart showing the expected time and schedule we will spend

in our project.

Figure 3: Gantt Chart

8. Team Organization & Group Dynamics

HelperTech consists of four diligent, creative, and precise engineers: Leo Cheng, Peter

Hsiao, Joseph Shen and Yuyuan Liu. Peter and Leo are in System engineering. They are

good at designing the mechanical parts and programming with embedded system. Joseph

and Yuyuan are from electrical engineering. They are very familiar with circuit design.

Yuyuan also has strong techniques on embedded system programming. Our diverse

interest and advantage will contribute to the success of this project. For more information

about our team members, please refer to the company profile section.

Since at the beginning of the company establishment, we only have four people and

23/1/2011 2/2/2011 12/2/2011 22/2/2011 4/3/2011 14/3/2011 24/3/2011 3/4/2011

Motors able to move

Control Wheel's direction/speed

power switch for snow thrower

snow thrower direction

power distribution circuit

Camera processing

salt spraying unit

motors for camera

First Integration

Wireless communication

Second Integration

cable release automation

Final Integration


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limited funding. Everyone in the company will play two rules, political rule and technical

rule. For political rule, Leo, our CEO, will be in charge of overall development progress

and resolve any conflicts both inside and outside the company. Peter, our CFO, will focus

on the budget supervision. He will try his best to reduce the development cost. YuYuan

Liu will take care of everyday technical operation process and directly report to CEO.

Joseph, our VP marketing, will try to do the product advertisement and promotion. He

will also try to monitor the market situation. For the technical rule, Leo and YuYuan are

responsible for creating the control system for the robot. Peter and Joseph are responsible

for constructing the mechanical parts and creating some power transmission circuit. In

addition, for the fast development of our company, team members are encouraged to

contribute more than the responsibilities stated above.

In order to maintain the positive group dynamics and expedite, accurate communication,

every week CEO will hold a meeting in which everyone will report the weekly progress

and blockers. To make sure that controlling system division and mechanical & electrical

system division have enough understanding to each other, YuYuan and Peter will be the

coordinators for these two divisions. They are the bridge of the information for these two

systems. In addition, the team will assign one person every week to arrange the project

journals written by everyone, which afterwards, will be read by CEO or other team

members if necessary. This way, CEO can manage the whole progress of the development.

Our company values fostering employees. We are not extracting their talents; instead, we

are enlightening them to obtain more personal success. The task assignment is not only

based on the team member’s technical strength and weakness, but also their interests.

Thus, people will show more motivations when doing the project.

Proper team work and positive group dynamics will enforce our friendship and accelerate

the development process. I believe by the leading of CEO, we will finish the project

successfully.


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9. Company Profile

Leo Cheng – Chief Executive Officer (CEO)

Leo is a system engineering student and is doing his last academic semester in SFU. He

has also completed all three required co-op teams, where two co-op teams are completed

in Broadcom and one co-op team is completed as research co-op in SFU. During his

co-op teams and academic study, he gained experience on programming in a variety of

programming languages which includes: C/C++, Java, Matlab, Qt (C++), OpenGL (C++),

Perl, Tcl, Ruby, Icon, and SQL.

Peter Hsiao – Chief Finance Officer (CFO)

Peter is currently doing his last academic semester as a systems engineering student in

Engineering Science, SFU. During the school years, Peter has gained strong

fundamentals in the fields of control systems, mechanical design, and software

programming. During his first co-op placement as an embedded software designer in

Research In Motion, he has acquired decent knowledge in embedded systems and

embedded programming. He has also developed skills in designing mechanical parts and

operating power tools in machine shop in his second Co-op term as an undergraduate

research assistant.

YuYuan Liu – Vice President of Operations (VP Operations)

YuYuan Liu is a fourth year Electrical Engineering student at SFU with two co-op terms

in Nokia. He is an experienced C/C++ programmer. He migrated and modified a web

based testing framework to a Qt (C++) and QML based testing framework in Nokia. He

programmed with C in real-time embedded system to control robot arms. He is familiar

with Ruby scripting and Linux shell languages. Further, he is familiar with designing

analog and digital circuit. Finally, as an engineer, he deeply understands the importance

of team work and I am good at collaboration and cooperation.


15

Joseph Shen – Vice President of Marketing (VP Marketing)

As a 4th

year electronic engineering student, Joseph has a strong interest and skills in

software design, project debugging and problem solving. He has completed projects such

as designing embedded system with C, and designing a virtual drum machine on Xilinx

Virtex 2 Pro(XUPV2P) development board(Advanced Digital System Design course in

SFU), where he played the software role in the team(using C). He had also audited course

relates to internet protocols and video processing. His other projects include

programming on FPGA using assembly language, and various coding projects using

C/C++.

10. Conclusion

HelperTech is eager to provide convenient engineering methods and solution to general

public. Our first product, snow blower robot - RoboBlow, will provide the best and

marketable solution to snow removal compared to the existing product. RoboBlow

provides the possibility of removing snow outdoor while the user controls the robot

indoor with comfort.

With our thoroughly planed project schedule, budget and funding, and talented members,

our project will be completed successfully as planned.


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11. References

1) House-snow

http://www.oldmanstreet.com/blog/?p=48

2) Robot snowblower

http://www.trendhunter.com/photos/29942#!/photos/29942/1

3) Remote controller

http://www.electronicinteriors.ca/home-theater-remote.html

4) Statistics for heart diseases per year

http://www.heartandstroke.com/site/c.ikIQLcMWJtE/b.3483991/k.34A8/Statistics.htm

5) Heart diseases associated with snow shovelling

http://www.heartandstroke.com/site/apps/nlnet/content2.aspx?c=ikIQLcMWJtE&b=3

485821&ct=6752035

6) Baby boom aging

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2007/07/17/census-canada.html

7) Snow Removal (Wiki)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_removal

http://www.oldmanstreet.com/blog/?p=48

http://www.trendhunter.com/photos/29942#!/photos/29942/1

http://www.electronicinteriors.ca/home-theater-remote.html

http://www.heartandstroke.com/site/c.ikIQLcMWJtE/b.3483991/k.34A8/Statistics.htm

http://www.heartandstroke.com/site/apps/nlnet/content2.aspx?c=ikIQLcMWJtE&b=3485821&ct=6752035

http://www.heartandstroke.com/site/apps/nlnet/content2.aspx?c=ikIQLcMWJtE&b=3485821&ct=6752035

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2007/07/17/census-canada.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_removal

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Re: ENSC Project Proposal for Remote Control Snow Blower Robotwhitmore/courses/ensc305/projects/2011/6prop.pdf · Re: ENSC Project Proposal for Remote Control Snow Blower Robot Dear