El Reg needs you – to help build an automated beer-transporting robot The Register needs to build a robot capable of transporting multiple pints of beer without spilling a drop. Can you help? Vulture Central has moved to a shiny new shared collaboration space in central London, which, among other exciting advances, features a selection of beers to refresh thirsty hacks, weary from a day of …
Not really in the spirit/beer of the article but Office Jnrs do have flaws
1. They expect a reward
2. Office Jnr on previous errand was told to get something for themselves, so they bought themselves a nice jumper (sweater if your USA).
3. Good ones always break down or get lost.
How About a Tea Lady /Person?
As well as providing valuable employment to someone they can also push a trolley carrying biscuits and other snacks.
Alternatively: Beer pumps direct to desks run along the network conduit. Could also be put into the budget as liquid cooling or some such thing.
An Arduino-powered autonomous bot with a connection to the PFY's smartphone via Bluetooth plus GPS and a cooler to keep the beer cool and unspilled should be relatively simple to build. The trick is picking the glass up and placing it on the designated drinker's desk, or can your PFY do this?
"I remember doing this in the 80s as a child using cans of coke, a Big Trak and the optional self emptying trailer attachment.
How do I claim my prize?"
You don't. You forget to put the beer in special proprietary pouches, only usable once per serving, sold only by you, pre-filled from a very small "carefully chosen" selection of shite brands and the obligatory insecure bluetooth IoT comms link to a special smartphone app that only works on the very latest Android version that shows a picture of the brand label of the beer as it arrives.
GPS? It's just got to follow the PFY. And while you might use a duino to drive the motors, you'll want the Pi for the brains (whatever following system is used, and obstacle avoidance).
But the really difficult part here is 'without spilling a drop'. If we're talking about pints, in proper, broad-rimmed pint glasses, filled to the brim, putting them on any kind of motor vehicle without spillage is damn tricky. The platform will have to be suspended nicely so that it remains flat, and even then, the robot will need to avoid sudden jerky movements.
I'd probably just give the PFYs a talk on why the business is transitioning to performance-related pay, and clearly explain their new KPIs.
A £35 Arduino Mega 2560 with an InvenSense MPU-6050 MEMS accelerometer and Gyro - tested with a small glass with water and it reacts just about fast enough to stabilise.
Last year I ate at a restaurant in Prague (Vytopna - it has a few other branches around the Czech Republic too) where drinks are delivered to the table by G-scale model trains.
Anything delivered by model train is cool.
There's this one restaurant in Wisconsin Dells, just off Interstate 94. We had stayed in the waterpark resort next door and needed a good meal before hitting the highway for hours. The kids loved it. Forget drinks: they delivered the whole meal!
The boiler room of one place I worked in had several large pipes that wandered off to distant parts of the factory.
Along with the usual labels such as "Gas" and "Rising fire main", four of the larger pipes were labelled "Mild", "Bitter", "Tea (with)" and "Tea (without)".
Along with the usual labels such as "Gas" and "Rising fire main", four of the larger pipes were labelled "Mild", "Bitter", "Tea (with)" and "Tea (without)".
One must be careful labeling the pipes lest the sewer pipe get labeled "Executive Quality Beer" or something similar and the peons try tapping into it.
Sod the down votes this is a proper designer talking.
Loads of detailed comments further down which are really over engineering, but the basic requirement is to have beer available without having to send someone to get it.
Oh, and the obvious fun bit (of the more practical designs) is in the transport of filled glasses without spillage. Pending further information I am assuming that snacks and drinks are self service, so loading the platform is going to be the major development task, not the trundling bit. The beer is also going to be bottled/canned so no glass filling required prior to transport. If the office provider is foolish enough to have a full time barperson then table service is a small part of the role.
Reminds me strongly of the urban legend that NASA spemt millions developing a pen which would write in zero gravity, whilst the Russians used a pencil.
As for lateral thinking, how about a mobile desk which the journo can push/drive to the snacks area and back? Make it a stand up one and work, exercise and refreshment can be combined.
Complicated design can be fun but how many times have developers gone off on one without even reading/receiving the full requirements?
We're not in Shoreditch. We're using WeWork in Sydney, San Francisco and London (Gray's Inn Road, Camden).
In each location, we have our own private walled-off offices with our own desks, phones, Ethernet, etc, adjoining a shared space that has stuff like coffee, tea, biscuits/cookies, beer, cider, wine, kitchen, sofas, etc.
Well, except in California. They took away our alcohol :(
C.
Now, where's that link I usually trot out at times like these?
Ah, yes, here it is. :p
As to solving the problem in the London office - I imagine there's a sprinkler system. Consider re-purposing it.
"Well, except in California. They took away our alcohol :("
That's not California, that's San Francisco. Y'all would be much better off moving up to Sonoma County. Great booze, great food, not in the rat-race, better weather (no, really!), the local .gov stays out of other people's business (mostly), and it's a hell of a lot cheaper.
> "In each location, we have our own private walled-off offices with our own desks, phones, Ethernet, etc, adjoining a shared space that has stuff like coffee, tea, biscuits/cookies, beer, cider, wine, kitchen, sofas, etc."
Uh-huh, you mean you work from a bedsit?
It's clear that some commentators are not taking this seriously enough, however I do think that we need a site visit to fully understand the problems that need to be overcome, and we need to examine very closely the types of beer served and the containers used, I suggest you invite the readership to join you in said watering hole and buy them all a beer
How many beers?
Are they all pints, or do some girlies drink halves?
Can we assume standard beer glasses, or are they pint pots with handles?
Is it just beer, or are there glasses of white wine, mojito, G&T as well?
How often is this used (one a day, just afternoons, or every 15 minutes?)
Come On El Reg - we are professionals here - we need a full end user expectation statement!
Why build a robot?
I myself am already a fully-autonomous, self-contained, intelligent* beer-transportation system. Simply feed real ale into my oral input receptacle, and within just a few hours I can output lager wherever it is required. Warmed and under slight pressure. Although I strenuously deny any rumours that I've been working for Fosters for years...
*I'd pass a Turing test - if required to sober-up. Probably...
There even is a model specifically for such purposes - cheaper than a vacuum cleaner, because it does not have the cleaning parts.
I suggest that one important hack would be to implement soft start/soft stop, as to avoid tipping of the liquid being transported. Perhaps some kind of a closed loop controller with proportional/integral/derivative calculation and sensitive acceleration sensors in two or three directions ...
A roomba-like tray would seem to be either a trip hazard or, if taller, somewhat unstable.
Better to have something with a wide base (recognising the suggestions of using a Big-trak)
http://hackhitchin.org.uk/bighak/
Or self-balancing :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-wvVul0kd4
...you can test a mechanical system for not spilling beer. I'm thinking of the beer held in a cradle, suspended from the apex of a pyramid frame. For testing purposes this frame can just be bolted on top of a 18" x 18" wooden board with castors - of the type sold to shift furniture.
It may work. It may not. That's what the testing is for.
Of course, if all beer glasses are of uniform height, one can just use a hinged clamp-down lid to avoid spillage.
I suggest that the cradle or platform be colour-coded or otherwise marked to ensure the empty glass that is sent to the bar returns (full) to the journo who sent it.
Of course, if all beer glasses are of uniform height, one can just use a hinged clamp-down lid to avoid spillage.
Or, you could transport the beers in their original, closed containers accompanied by an equal amount of glasses[0] and this ingenious device[1] used to get access to the contents of a closed container of the bottle variety, commonly known as a bottle opener.
[0] do the set of available beers include ones that would call for dedicated glasses?
[1] not required for Grolsch (and several German beers) half-liter bottles, and tins.
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