Log Day 17
020911
Tiffany produced a new video of powerful advocacy for robotic mine mapping. Some of
the power derives from others telling the story for us. The soundtrack is synthesized
from TV commentators, and the imagery is a combination of TV and CMU research
clips. Content includes perspectives from Arlen Specter, John Weir TV commentators,
and CMU luminaries like Scott Thayer and Sebastian Thrun. Copies are in production.
Our enterprise team is credentialed, qualified, and they are aggressively pursuing
questions of market, product, IP, strategy and organization to distill a business plan. Their
first formulation is scheduled for mid September, and their final plan is due mid
November. One suggestion is to password-protect our website. Another is to capture IP.
The enterprise conversation resonated, and Q&A had to be cut short to honor other topics
of the day.
Eric Close declared the intention of Workhorse Technologies to speculate on the
prospective IP that we might generate. Workhorse will provide an operating resource for
use in our work. The agreement begins to give us structure and identity beyond that of
being students in a course. Amy has a partial record of our correspondence on this
matter. Eric commits to concrete an agreement with CMU.
Our six-day goal is to generate specifications for prospective mine mapping robot
archetypes. We reviewed the content, purpose and process of specification in depth.
Christian will lead the specification process, and advocates spoke for the specific robot
types that we will look at this week. A surprising conversation ensued around naming of
robots, and specifically around naming our robots. I learned that working names for our
quick-look robots are “Groundhog” and “Gopher”. As a team exercise, we will more
formally name these robots next week. Christian will look into how car companies and
others name their models.
We considered the “Groundhog” as a strawman for the specification discussion. We
demonstrated the ability to conceive, name, formulate, describe functionality, estimate
technical performance, guess weight, spec power, cost, price, market and customers to a
depth appropriate for development considerations.
Chuck is in communication with MSHA regarding certification and process for our quick
look. Chuck is providing MSHA with block diagrams and operating scenarios to support
the discussions.
Technical and fabrication of our quick look technology proceeds apace.
83 days remain