Our challenge consider the journey of food from the garden to our homes. With information obtained from the WHO and entering into the current problem in which food is positioned in an important role for the life of each one of us, they are fundamental but nevertheless generate a risk of contagion through their transfer.
Our project takes all these factors as a reference and instead of turning it into a fundamental element at risk, it is kept safely by preserving food without human contact to prevent risk and in the same way make use of automation and technology for harvesting, packaging and cultivation of food products.
Now, the problem is not only the bacteria in the environment where the food is planted and harvested, but also the possible infecting of coronavirus by the workers who interact with the food or the materials where the food is packed during the process that it follows to get from the ground to our plate. So, the problem is a virus, for which we need a controlled environment, as a greenhouse; a totally robotized greenhouse which has no human-interaction inside, so the food does not have any possible source of infection. To combat it we can use a robotized system that is totally sterilized to harvest the food in our controlled environment. But having an almost obsessive sanity during the collection and packaging processes is not enough, we need to ensure to final customers (who will eat the food) that the internal product (the food) is as sterile as it came out from the greenhouse,
Now the question is, how can we sterilize all the mechanisms and the materials used for packing the food? There are multiple sterilization methods that nowadays are widely used for packaging for exports, but we can apply this for local and national sales. Fortunately, the materials which are treated with this method are reusable. We determined that the best and cheaper (without scarifying integrity and sterility of the product) method is “Radio Frequency Heating”, with this one, we can use pinus radiata wood as packaging component. The pinus radiata wood is one of the cheaper and commonly used wood because of it is present throughout the entire American continent; and despite the fact that it is considered a harmful species for various ecosystems, various studies have proven that this is not the case.
We as a team are inspired by this challenge since throughout this semester of our careers, we participate in social service activities. In this service we support an organization called "Banco de Alimentos", that is responsible for supporting the poor population with food donated by other organizations. Seeing that it is a very motivating task, we feel a direct connection to this challenge because we already had an approach to this issue of food and how the population was affected by the virus.
During this challenge, the first thing we looked for as a team was to generate better confidence through a good conversation via video call. Then we agreed to search for as much information as possible, by searching the Internet, family or acquaintances. Our team brainstormed to have different proposal options to finally vote and select the best idea. We chose the idea of
sanitizing greenhouse robbery because it was a proposal that brought together a little of everything that we seek to solve.
For this project we use CAD design software, with which we generate a predesign of how we would like this robot to be. In the same way, we want anyone who sees the design to immediately grasp the idea of
solution that we seek to achieve. The most challenging part for us was to simplify all the information obtained, and capture it so everyone that sees our war is able to understand it, and be able to apply it to their own situation.
For this project we used reliable information from various sources relates to this challenge such as NASA, so we can be sure that our project is 100% reliable and we have a solid foundation so we are able to create a great project
Link 5 slide presentation