Throughout November and December of 2022, I participated in the Last Mile Delivery Living Lab Season 2 program organized by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport (MOLIT) and sponsored by the Incheon Free Economic Zone (IFEZ), Incheon Startup Park, and Yonsei University.
The program, in essence, is a community-led initiative to solve many of the food delivery problems that Songdo faces through delivery robots; with the Incheon Global Campus also participating, many students were able to witness delivery robots bringing their food up to their rooms without the need to go down the elevator simply using Yogiyo, a popular food delivery app.
Developing new technologies and beta-testing them, as I mention in my feature on Mason Korea, is an exciting prospect - and as someone minoring Computational and Data Sciences and Data Analysis, being able to apply the knowledge that I had learned in real-world scenarios, analyzing what issues might occur during the delivery process, using Arduino, was something that I thoroughly enjoyed.
In particular, as a member of Team 3, we got to use modules, such as the camera, real-time-clock and magnetic and shock sensors, in tandem with our Arduino code to detect, for example, when the door had opened or closed, or if the robot had experienced some kind of shock during the delivery process.
Getting all of these modules, sensors, and code to work was by no means easy, but our team was able to create a working prototype at the end of the two month long project, which I was able to present, representing Team 3, at Start Up Park Incheon, to provide feedback to other staff who were involved in the project, which hopefully will help once these robots become widely adopted throughout Songdo.
All in all, I thank the entirety of Team 3 who worked night and day to integrate their bits of code into the final prototype that we had created, and staff members from Yonsei University who were incredibly helpful and supportive throughout the project to make our ideas come to fruition.