Overview
Dates: February 2018 to January 2020
The UNEEKBOT is a robotic system that consists of two ABB industrial arms which work together to build a shoe. In 2018, KEEN embarked on a marketing tour that brought the UNEEKBOT across the country to different colleges. I operated the system during these events and acted as the main field engineer for the system. The system was also useful for various R&D projects that I performed for KEEN in late 2018 and 2019.
My Role
I had two main areas of responsibility with the UNEEKBOT system:
- Fix it when it broke on marketing tours
- Perform research on the system to quantify its performance for factory production.
The Marketing Tour
The tour began in March of 2018. I began traveling with the robot before I had finished school, and therefore had to work on my thesis on the road. We performed a few legs of the tour:
- March 2018 to May 2018: all up and down the West Coast visiting schools like UC Irvine, USC, FIDM LA and FIDM SF, among others.
- Summer 2018: Went to Las Vegas for a trade show, went to Japan (Tokyo) for an event there
- September 2018: Went to the East coast and visited schools like FIT, Pratt, Georgetown, RISD, among others.
- Februrary 2019: I went back to Japan to service their robot and fully train several of their staff members on how to use the system
- April 2019: Utah schools
As the robotics engineer, I operated the UNEEKBOT at every event, and made sure that it ran smoothly. This meant that when the system broke down, I was there to fix it so we could continue displaying it to all who would come check it out. I was also the point person to talk about how robotics would be useful in Footwear innovation and strengthening manufacturing in the United States. I received marketing and PR training for this role in order to present the robot and KEEN in the best light. Later on in mid 2019, I trained staff from Hong Kong and Japan on how to operate the robot so that they could do their own events.
Research and Development
When we weren’t on the road, I used the system to perform R&D on various shoe production processes (confidential). What I can say is that R&D required me to gain intimate knowledge with the systems software and hardware, so that I could write new programs. I wrote software for the system in the ABB robot language RAPID, and designed a device for the system that controlled the error rates (the UTD). I performed experiments in order to improve the systems performance, and evaluate what needed to be done before using it in the factory.
