The Enduring Pursuit for Innovation
Last semester, Lt. Col. Steve Crews, an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Mechanical Engineering, mentored a capstone team of four cadets as they spent their academic year developing autonomous robots.
The robots would function as a modern solution to assist the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant in streamlining its manufacturing process.
Concurrently, over the past two months in this academic year, Crews’ new group of cadets is taking last year’s robotics concept and the group is evolving it to a more refined, technically proficient place.
Last year’s team solved a plethora of problems as it encountered challenges developing the robots with limited information on the IAAP’s architectural design.
This year, Crews didn’t allow the new capstone team to investigate the problems that the last capstone team endured until after they visited the IAAP. As a result, Class of 2022 Cadets Skander Guizani, Alexander Murphy, Steven Butts, Ethan Rabb and Isaac Hagberg were ready to venture into uncharted territory and solve the complexities of developing Warehouse Autonomous Robots for the IAAP as part of their capstone project at the U.S Military Academy.
“For the first month of class, I gave them hardware — I gave them robots and I taught them how to control robots, and how to talk between computers so that one robot can talk to another robot. So that way, they understood the hardware a little bit before they got to the problem,” Crews said. “Afterward, (the cadets) could start looking at the problem with a sense for their capabilities.”
Soon after, the capstone team journeyed to the IAAP to collect data on the inner workings of the plant, from how it operationalizes to manufacture rounds to the architectural structure of the warehouse itself.
Due to operational security, the cadets could not record video or take photos of the experience. However, despite the drawback, they took copious notes. Guizani, for instance, said he drew rough sketches of the technology the IAAP used and other things that stood out to him that would help the team’s work process. “We were allowed to see everything,” Butts added. “We were allowed to take notes and conceptualize everything we saw in our mind while being escorted by a government employee or the supervisor of whatever station we were at.”
The cadets spoke with many people on the contractor and government sides as they were trying to form comprehensive ideas of what problems to solve.
“One of the problems one of the contractors from the American Ordnance company informed us on was how many times M795 1.55 rounds are manually lifted and moved from one cart to another cart around a dozen times,” Crews said. “They’re using a hoist they have to attach to the round and move it. And so, one of the options for them is to automate that process. The (robot) can move the round one at a time or lift and move all of them at once like bowling pins.”
The cadets also learned about the history of the IAAP and how the plant was constructed in the 1940s. For many generations, the plant became the life’s blood for countless families, with many employees taking pride in supporting U.S. military operations throughout the latter 20th century into the 21st century through the manufacture of ammunition.
Butts added that the employees were very enthusiastic and keen on showing the cadets their usual tasks and procedures during a typical workday.
“It pumps up (the employees) to see us come by and put a face to the name and think ‘these are the people that I’m enabling to go fight wars and defend our country,’” Hagberg said. “That meant a lot to them and it meant a lot to us.”
Watching the workflow, taking down written and mental notes, and internalizing the history of the town, the community and their generational link with the IAAP gave the cadets all the content and resources they needed to continue the WAR capstone project with a greater sense of purpose.
Application and Iteration
After the WAR capstone team returned, Crews started assessing the cadet’s strengths and weaknesses based on the math and technical quandaries last semester’s group endured.
After learning each cadet’s idiosyncrasies, Crews broke them up into their sublet disciplines within the realm of robotics, and the cadets wasted no time plugging away.
“Remember, robotics is a combination of computer science, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and a little bit of systems engineering, too,” Crews said. “So, that’s why it’s important to have people from all of those disciplines, involved in this process, even though much of what they’re going to be doing is mechanical and computer science focused.”
The cadets divided their responsibilities into three sections: Murphy and Butts are focusing on developing the mechanical structure of the robot. Hagberg and Rabb are sticking to the mathematical technicalities that go into coding the robots to perform their tasks. Finally, Guizani aims to show the robots how to see and intuit their surroundings and the human beings that may work around them to emphasize safety.
“Last year, I was coordinating how the cadets worked. This year, I’m going to try to let them do their thing,” Crews said. “This year’s problem (compared to last year) is going to be a little bit easier for them to envision because they saw the plant with their own eyes.”
The Mind of a Craftsman
At Mahan Hall in room D14, a large table sat in the center of the laboratory. Cable wires sat under the table in a coiled mass connected to three robots fastened tightly to the table’s edges, with the fourth robot sitting at the center.
While Murphy and Rabb were in another class that day on Nov. 5, Guizani, Butts and Hagberg sat around the large table as they observed a large high-definition television screen that displayed the early stages of how the robots will see and distinguish human beings.
Perhaps if someone didn’t mention it, no one would know how wearied the gentlemen were. Guizani, Butts and Hagberg had gotten three to four hours of sleep before entering the makeshift laboratory to continue their robotics research.
Still, coffee and canned energy drinks did enough to mask the outward fatigue.
While the cadets have encountered many barriers in their efforts, the small victories, at this point, are enough to motivate them to reach the end goal of providing the IAAP the robots needed to make their work process more seamless than ever.
With that, Hagberg said that the lack of sleep was partly due to his excitement in making a breakthrough in his WAR research.
“I just, intrinsically, really enjoy the work. It’s not that I don’t have as many of those ‘man, it’s not working’ moments. For me, It’s just a matter of the hours you put in,” Hagberg said. “For me, with most problems, they are just a matter of putting X amount of hours in and then you’ll figure it out.”
Meanwhile, Guizani constantly searches for small victories that will eventually lead to a thinking robot that can intuit human movement and function in a working environment with the safety of humans in mind.
“There are two different kinds of robots. Some robots will be put in a cage, so it doesn’t hurt human beings like a ‘killer robot,’ right? And then there are the robots (we are building) without a cage,” Guizani explained. “My goal is to make a feature that will stop the robot when a human being or an object approaches it.”
Three split frames were displayed on the TV screen, each indicating a particular aspect of what the robots are meant to see. Guizani explained the frames are video images made of pixels that change in real-time. It captures how the pixels change at the start and at the end of a movement by an object or individual.
“Whenever I get something to work, that will get me a little bit excited and I forget how tired I am,” Guizani said. “But after working into the night, I see it’s already three in the morning and I feel super tired.”
Sometimes passion for a craft brings with it questions that challenge that burgeoning craftsman. For Butts, the questions sometimes come from a place of frustration, passion and wondering if you are good enough at four in the morning.
“I know for myself, there’ve been many times I’ve been like, ‘screw this. It’s not working. I don’t want to do it anymore,’ but then I think about my deadline, and while I’m working all those hours, within a small gap, I’ll have a breakthrough,” Butts said. “While the breakthroughs haven’t happened a lot, just gritting through the doubt and achieving that one win makes it all worth it.”