Week #2: Excuse Me, Garçon?

1. A decision has been made

As discussed last week, the team had two ideas in mind for this challenge: Autonomous Restaurant or Autonomous Clothes Store.

After discussing both ideas with the professors, the team concluded that the Autonomous Restaurant would be the idea to follow through, as it offers a more dynamic environment than a clothes store, while also allowing us to avoid certain challenges that are present in a clothe store when compared to a restaurant.

For instance, when a client makes a request, in a restaurant the robots know where that client is seated, but in a clothes store, the client is free to walk around the store and tracking his position is quite a complex task.

On the other hand, a restaurant offers more opportunities to implement both collaborative and competitive behaviours in the agents, as they may account for the bigger interests of the restaurant but also their own (e.g. maybe allow the robots to receive tips or an incentive based on their performance).

With this in mind, the team proposes a multi-agent system composed by robot assistants/waiters responsible for managing a dining room of a restaurant, by executing tasks such as: directing clients to their table, taking their meal requests and serving them when ready, and, finally, receiving the payment for its service.

In case the team finds time for it, it would also be interesting to integrate some IoT devices to help the robots with tasks such as counting the amount of people in the restaurant and prioritize certain meals, by measuring the temperature of the food.

2. Scientific article and next steps

Having settled on the challenge's subject and started its implementation, the team decided that it was time to also start working on the scientific article, starting with its introduction and continuing with the state of the art in the next week.

Furthermore, the team expects, next week, to dive deeper into the components that will make up this system, all the way from the types of agents and interactions between them, to the robotics and IoT topics to be covered by the project, while also taking advantage of the classes to start experimenting with the tools that will be used in this project's development, such as ROS, Gazebo, JADE and Arduino.