Ocado

Contact: David Sharp <david.sharp@ocado.com>

2020 project: Feeding Body and Mind

I have heard on the media that there are UK school children who don’t get enough to eat during the day because they are not eligible for free school meals and because they don’t have enough money to buy proper food.

I therefore suggest we consider a group project which develops a system that enables the following:

1. Donors (either individuals or companies or other organisations or a combination of individuals plus matched-funding by companies/charities) can donate money (with gift Aid where appropriate) 2. Schools can sign up to use the donated money to buy food (and recyclable cutlery/crockery) on Ocado.com or morrisons.com and someone at the school organises the purchases/deliveries 3. Children can come along to a “club” where the food is given out 4. At the “club” the children get to eat the food and also get to learn how to code using Ocado’s “Rapid Router” and “aimmo” online games

This addresses the hunger problem and educates the children in computer programming so that they can get reasonably paid jobs and their children won’t have the same problem.

Do you think that a Group could create enough software for the above to be set up and to start the initiative during the project?

We could support this with - technical help concerning interfacing to Ocado.com to create online orders - technical help with App development - particularly if a cross-platform (iOS / Android) technology such as Dart and Flutter was used - other help as needed

Possible idea to explore:

it was interesting to hear about your new mobile turtlebots being introduced into Amanda Prorok’s course. This opens up some potential for “Sim to real” experiments / reinforcement learning /projects.

It would be great if we could encourage the Cambridge Engineering and Computing robotics research teams to connect together to create an activity in reinforcement learning for legged robotics to endeavour to create a rival to “Anymal” http://www.rsl.ethz.ch/robots-media/anymal.html from ETHZ and the MIT Cheetah https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/04/mits-speedy-mini-cheetah-robot-learns-to-backflip/

Feedback:

We will think about how your sim-to-real concept might be adapted to the course, and what kind of robot hardware could be used. Past experience is that CS students have only limited hardware construction skill - we usually have to arrange for them to have assistance from a technician. There also seems to be a slight tendency for them to be scared off from robot projects, rather than stimulated. Last year we had to cancel the following two projects for lack of interest, despite the fact that they both seemed fairly entertaining to me:

• Visual Pick and Place
• Robot Death Watch