Budget Breakdown
The total budget is $60K. Below shows the percentages of the application of the funds.
Personnel
Robot Missions will be bringing on a Software Engineer, a Missions Operations Intern, and Erin will be compensated for her full- time work on Robot Missions. The team will all work together to prepare for the final customer demonstration of the summer. The Software Engineer will develop the cognition for the imagery. As well as the swarm intelligence, for managing the fleet of robots. The Missions Operations Intern will assist with coordinating the daily testing of the robots – observations from this will go into the next day’s testing of the robots.
Volunteers
As the volunteers will also be helping with the daily testing, Robot Missions will hold monthly gatherings to hear their experiences and feedback. This will be organised by the Mission Operations intern, and we will purchase a few pizzas and fruit juice for the volunteers.
Robots
Robot Missions will be producing 5 robots in order to show the capabilities of the robots in swarm performance. 3 of them will be used daily, 2 of them will be used for demonstrations or swapping out if one of them needs repairs. Robot Missions will also be upgrading some of our existing robots, so that they can also be utilised in the field.
Design Prototyping
In discussing with the park supervisors and workers, they may request modifications of the robot to tailor it to a customised task. For example, if a certain area always sees plastic bottles, then this design prototyping budget will cover the material costs of developing that module.
Experiment Setup
Transporting multiple robots between our work area and the site each day would not be a sustainable effort. By setting up a canopy and deck box on site, Robot Missions will be able to store our robots there. Allowing the volunteers to deploy the robots each day, perform any necessary software updates, and collect data. .
Equipment
We will need another 3D printer to produce the 5 robots. The Palette+ will allow us to print with water-soluble supports, which will decrease Robot Missions’ post-production cleaning time before assembly. Laptops will be for the interns (unless they will bring their own) to use during development, and the screen to view the high resolution imagery.
Marketing
Robot Missions marketing budget is used for buttons to give to the community Field Tests for youth, and two flags for showing where the testing is taking place.
Operational Costs
Robot Missions will be operating out of a space, to be finalised as the project commences. We will use software to help with the company’s payroll duties. A monthly Adobe Creative Cloud license will let Robot Missions use photoshop to make our marketing material. These will support the daily operations while we lead up to, and perform, the final demonstration.