Qizhao Peng

I used to have a bachelor degree in Material Science and Engineering from the University of Science and Technology Beijing. After graduating, I chosed to transfer my major to Product Design Engineering. In the past year, I learned a lot about product design in Glasgow. As the last project of my master’s study stage, I focused on the topic of “Future Food Supply”.

FUTURE FOOD SUPPLY
Shared Food Delivery Robot for Urban Balcony Farming

There is huge diversity in the way people usually get food today, such as meal deal from Tesco, takeout, cooking at home, fast food, etc. But what the food supply will be in the future？There may be more possibilities.

Analysing based on Speculative Design, both physical store disappearing and more direct contact with food producer are possible futures. But, No matter which one will be the future, Freshness is very likely to be still one of important requirements. From another angle, lots of food were wasted in past few months due to epidemic because some people over-purchased surplus food. However, residents live in my apartment shared their surplus food with neighbor, which reveals the huge potential benfits of social participation for dealing with food supply.

Accordingly, in order to provide food as fresh as possible and improve sense of social participation, I decided set Urban Farming as Main Context and Surplus food Sharing as Main Concept. Then I initially created such background: There is such kind of apartment with balcony farms and residents could share food with neighbor. Based on this scenario, lots of evidence support me to design a food delivery facility. And I developed my design concept from smart tracking cart to one-piece delivery robot and finally to modular delivery robot. More detailed Design Process Journal on the right illustrates entire concept development and design process.

Final product were designed to contain two parts: Sharing Box and Travelling Robot. There are 1 sharing box per household which is used to store surplus food and 2 travelling robots per 8 households which is used to transport box automatically. As for how it works, the project poster and video on the right shows a story which may be of great help for you to understand it.

Susan grows three species of vegetables on her balcony. One day, she harvests some and reserves what she need. Then she puts surplus food into sharing box and uploads sharing data with her phone. Few mintues later, travelling robot sends notification to her when it arrives. The sharing box is placed on robot and will be transported to the sharing room. Travelling Robot can find the path automatically, including taking lifts. In sharing room, zhang, as a volunteer, will take sharing box off and sort food inside. If sharing box away, travelling robot is free to execute the next command controlled by the cloud server. Go back to susan, her son fells not satisfied with only three types of vegetable. So she orders some food other grows. If informed a new order, zhang will pick this order into an empty sharing box and send them by travelling robot. Finally, although susan just grows three types vegetables, what she can get will not be limited in these three species.

In conclusion, this product will help to build a cooperative community in a building where residents can get various fresh food directly from balcony farms mainly in order to meet their requirement of freshness and social participation.

Thank you for watching. Any thoughts or suggestions are welcomed.