Automated Luggage Transportation System (ALTS)

• Comfort: Moving heavy items, such as carry-on and luggage at the airport can be physically exhausting. ALTS provides travelers with the comfort of not requiring to push their luggage manually.
• Target Audience: Tired individuals, people with disabilities, and those of old age have trouble moving objects and pushing carts with luggage on them. ALTS is able to take the burden of luggage off of such travelers to provide a more streamlined and comfortable travel experience. Similarly, travelers who have their hands pre-occupied with small kids, or toddler carts, or food run into trouble when they have luggage.
• COVID-19: Given the current COVID-19 Pandemic, travelers are looking to avoid touching items as much as possible (including push-able carts). With ALTS, the traveler just needs to place their luggage on the cart, and from there, the cart can either be sent to a terminal using pre-determined routes or can follow the passenger using triangular mapping technology enabled by sensors and the Arduino microprocessor.
• Job Growth: In the long term, with widespread airport adaption, there will be an increase in the demand for high skilled jobs which require technical support on the trolleys.

Modular Design: The unique easy-to-install design of the ALTS robot allows any cart to become a “smart trolley.” This opens up a vast area of innovation in the baggage handling systems within airports, inviting exciting opportunities for investment and a potential increase in high skilled jobs.

Compact Footprint: Current automated, self-driving luggage bags have a large footprint and small carrying capacity. The ALTS

Intellectual Property: Lack of existing technology allows The A-Team to obtain copyright licenses and design patents.

Unlike the KLM Royal Dutch Airlines robot, ALTS is not limited to a single airline company and is deployable into all locations where existing airport trollies are used. Another competitor is “Smart suitcases”, which provides a single smaller product mainly focused on carry-on case sizes, which must be purchased with a larger upfront cost of ownership. Also, the integrated controller and battery pack further reduce the already limited space and available weight. On the other hand, ALTS is available to be rented by the users for a small fee based on the usage time instead of a single lumpsum payment, which would require their existing suitcases to be replaced. Additionally, considering ALTS’ utilization of typical airport trollies in combination with our modular product, the allowed luggage size and weight limits that airlines hold will not be impacted.

To validate the design assumptions, the Simulation team utilized a two-step procedure to run various operational scenarios and measure the performance.

Step 1: MATLAB Demonstration

To understand the manner in which the ALTS would follow a person, we begun with setting up a high-level, simplified MATLAB demonstration. In this demonstration, we are assuming no friction losses, and neither have set up the braking mechanism which would trigger when an obstacle is nearby. Listed below are the four objectives of the MATLAB code:

• Set up a walking trajectory for the person.
• Calculate the reference motor driving speed and steering angle.
• Calculate the position of the cart.
• Compare the trajectory of the person and the cart in plots.

The following video shows the MATLAB demonstration and its results:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04P5g0rrffs&ab_channel=BasitKazi

Step 2: Simulink Model

Using Simulink, we were able to model the behavior of the cart in a more sophisticated manner. Within Simulink, we incorporated real-life elements such as rolling resistance, drag force, and other frictional forces associated with the geometrical set-up of the ALTS and cart combination. The list below provides the objectives of the Simulink model:

• Model the geometrical factors of the cart and ALTS system. This includes the wheel geometry, losses due to air drag, and mass of the cart
• Model both the driving and steering motors, alongside the gearboxes to observe the efficiency and optimize the motor choice
• Model the battery that we chose for our ALTS system. Understand its consumption rate and whether we need a higher or lower capacity battery.

The video linked below describes the various functions and blocks used within the Simulink model:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJg41NgKLSM&ab_channel=BasitKazi

Simulink Results: Plotting the battery comsumption vs time in seconds

A validation tool we used was plotting the performance/usage of the battery as our simulation runs. This assumes a total mass of 50kg, and a target speed of around 1.2m/s. The simulation completes a total of 200 seconds of run time in which the battery only loses 0.25% of its original 100% charge. The important thing to note from this figure is the way the plot behaves, initially, there is the most amount of load on the motors, as the cart is moving from rest, that is why there is a sharp dip right at the start, but as the cart reaches the stable velocity, the battery usage is almost linear which is expected. These results from the Simulink model help us verify that the motor/gearbox and battery choice that we made are appropriate to our needs.

Under a load of 50kg, and a speed of 1.2 m/s, the battery will last 21 hours.

Unique Value Proposition: ALTS offers a unique solution to enhance traditional travel by using power-aided equipment that will alleviate fatigue and restlessness associated with traveling which will enhance the customer’s travel experience.

Low Upfront Manufacturing Cost: One unit costs $1300 and can pay itself off quite quickly if users are operating it under the assumed conditions mentioned above.

Lack of Competition: Our product incorporates a unique design when we are compared to other automated luggage solutions. The venture itself is low risk as the unit cost is low and most of the labor will be from our team in the initial phases.

Target Market: We tried to determine the Target Addressable market using different techniques.

One technique was to use the NAICS code: 488119 for Airport baggage handling services which would amount to a $4.8 Billion industry as a whole in 2020 for the United States of America. Further sub classifying in this category as retail stores and hospitality services would account for $527.20 Million (11%) of the whole industry. 
Finally, we resorted to estimating our target addressable market using a bottom-up approach in which we considered that approximately 4.92 Billion people were traveling yearly across the world prior to COVID-19. We chose to target 0.25 % of this vast market to account for people who are tired, preoccupied, disabled, have reduced mobility, and old age.

For the first 2 years, we would need roughly $350,000 to operate our product. However, this doesn’t take into account the profits we will be receiving as the months go by. Overall, we will have a net income that is positive even after accounting for our spending.