Internship intro

Do skip this

3 weeks into my internship with various ideas on the project that I should work on, I finally settled on a Lego part sorter. My internship had definitely been a tough start for me given that I was enrolled into the Global Entrepreneurial Internship Programme (GEIP). However, due to the COVID19 outbreak, I pulled out last minute and had to find a new internship within a span of 1 month where I was having my examinations.

After going back and forth with both the company and my school, I managed to get hold of an internship opportunity at Nullspace Robotics just a day before my internship was due to begin. With paperwork needed to be done, I had to start my internship 2 days late.

I was given a few project ideas to work on and only managed to start on this idea this week. The part sorter project has been something I’ve been wanting to work on previously and I can take this opportunity to make this a reality.

Relation back to Nullspace

There are a few key points that we must take into account. As this is a company project, it is quite obvious that we must keep the cost as minimal as possible. One of the key motives to work on this project is the staggering amount of parts that the company has to handle as part of the various activities that they organise.

Additionally, given that the Rochester center is situated in a public space, I felt it was quite appropriate to utilise the location as another source of income where we can help the public sort their Lego parts as a service.

TL;DR

This is where the project starts

This series of blogs documents the process of creating a Lego part sorter. This blog talks about the ideation process.

Visualising our work

With the limited time of 2 hours, we decided to first write out our thought process for the start of the project.

Firstly, we seperated the entire process into 3 main components. Namely: seperate, scan and sort. We also defined the objective of what we want to sort for our MVP to that of Lego Mindstorm parts as that is what our company mainly interacts with.

Secondly, we also set a pre-requirement that all the individual parts need to be seperated to ensure that the system is able to function.

Seperate

Looking at the seperation category, we want to ensure that anything processed into the scanning has to be individual parts or the system will be inaccurate. From there, we came up with 2 main ideas. One is to utilise a hoper and the second to make use of the lego conveyor belts which we already have. Ultimately, parts that exits this section has to be individually feeded into the scanning system.

Scan

Moving on to the scanning, it would ultimately utilise an A.I. to sort and scan for the parts. This would be covered in more detail in a later continuation of this blog.

Sort

After the scanning is completed, we move on to the sorting of the parts. Here, we defined a few categories which are mainly:

• Straight Beams
• Angled Beams
• Pins/Spacers
• Gears/Rounded objects
• Axels
• Sensors
• Miscellanous
• Bricks
• Unsortable

as well as sorting by specifications like:

• Colors
• Shape
• Size
• Number

We plan to automate this sorting process such that the parts are dynamically allocated to the various bins. Say there are only 8 sorting bins but 10 categories, the 2 extra categories can be reallocated to be placed with the other bins and will notify the user at the end of the sorting process that such a move had been done.

User stories

Additionally, we had also done a quick questioning with our colleagues to gather user stories that would be useful in allocating the various tasks in a later process.

Conclusion

That is it for today’s quick start on the project, see you next week 😃!