Tiffany Produced a New Video of Powerful Advocacy for Robotic Mine Mapping. Some of The

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