InnoVention Competition

Robotics Challenge for Household

Identify a problem in your household that can be addressed using a robot.
Build a robot using your VEX robotics kits to solve this problem.
Market your robotic solution to potential investors.

Identify

As you survey around your house, carefully analyze and examine opportunities for a robot to make a significant impact in your life. How can a robot simplify your life? Develop a Problem Statement and Solution.
Illustrative examples:

1. Robo-Trash Can: A robot that roams around in a room where you may be holding your party, it may follow a designated person for collecting trash from your guests.
2. Robo-Tray: A robot that follows you around with a tray full of beverages/food so that you have more to offer your guests at one time.
3. Robo-Mail: A robot that pick up your mail while you are on vacation so that potential thieves don’t realize you are not home.
4. Rob-Pets: A robot that performs surveillance on your pets when you are not home.
5. Handy-Robo: Painting/spraying/pest control robot.

Research Survey: Survey your household and/or ask questions to people you encounter. Develop a brief survey with 5 questions (it will help with the entrepreneurship aspect).
Possible questions:

1. What would ease your time at home?
2. What chores do you wish you had help with?
3. What chores would you trust a robot to do?
4. Give some examples as mentioned above.
5. How much are you willing to pay for a robotic solution to handle household chores?

Full example: Based on the survey results, select a problem statement and come up with a solution for the problem. For example, Robo-Tray Problem Statement: Whenever I host parties I can only bring one tray at a time to offer snacks to my guests. It would be great if I had someone to bring another tray to help me. Solution: build a robot that will follow me around with a tray to serve my guests.

Build

Design and build a mobile platform/robot to counter the pains and problems that you identified to be most feasible, needed, and innovative. It can be an

1. improvement in already existing solution,
2. an integration of different technologies, and/or
3. coming up with something new.

You need to finish the robot with a working demo and a video within the specified time limit. It should be a mechanically stable solution with a practical application in current households and people are interested to use them in their daily lives.

Market

Now you have identified the problem and built a prototype. How can you now market your “product”? Who are your customers? What is your price point? Identify your budget(s), materials, advertisement (i.e., social media, ads, etc.). Most importantly, develop a great pitch to persuade people to buy it. Robot name: Give your robot a name, this name will become your team name and is part of your marketing technique.

Internship Winners

Each team will choose 3-5 students to represent the class in the final competition. Each student team will compete for a chance to win bragging rights for their school and team. Judges will have a rubric to select team winners. Paid Internship awardees will be selected by your respective teachers and NYU instructors through a mutual agreed upon process. There will be 4 student winners that will receive a paid internship based on the following categories:

1. NYU ITEST Winner
2. Best Robotic Engineering
3. Best Innovation
4. Best Entrepreneurship

Date: May 22, 2018
Time: 9 AM - 12 PM
Location: NYC area