C3Flex v2.0

Background
Since the last two years our world has been facing a pandemic. The supply and demand imbalance has resulted in a global supply chain failure. Some supplies are urgent and cannot be delayed by this failure, like the medical supplies. My essay is about an innovative engineering solution to solve the delivery of urgent medical supplies. This is related to SDG goal #9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure and solutions like these will impact and build sustainable cities and communities of future (SDG goal #11).

Problem
Global supply and delivery issues can be especially bad for urgent medical needs. Let’s take three scenarios. Scenario 1: Location – House. A girl has the stomach flu and needs medicine quickly. Scenario 2: Location – Small Clinic. The doctors needs monthly supply of medicines and devices. Scenario 3: Location – Island. A small island needs urgent delivery of COVID tests. Looking at the above three examples, we have urgent and non-urgent medical needs. We also need something that can go across water to deliver to the island. How can we get all this delivered efficiently?

My Solution
My solution to solving the delivery of the medical supplies (urgent and non-urgent) is a design of a smart truck called C3 Flex v2.0. The C stands for Cargo collector, the 3 stands for the three built in modes of transportation - Drone, Speedboat on a Truck itself that auto drives. Flex stands for flexible arms that help pick the package and drop it down the chute on the roof of the truck. This is a smarter and improved version of the older C3Flex model. In this model, the packages ordered by the customers get a unique QR code based on urgency. The chute has the scanner at the bottom to scan the QR code and determine if package is urgent or not. Then the package is dropped into a mini dispatcher.

The mini dispatcher CPU does 4 tasks:

1. Map area/location of packages that need delivery
2. Get live traffic update of the areas
3. Count and plan map for number of packages by area
4. Determine mode of transportation to be used

The operator uses all the information above to load the cargo in its correct mode of transportation for efficient delivery. In the three scenarios from my problem, the first one which is urgent will be delivered by a Drone due to an accident in the area. The second urgent delivery (Scenario # 3) will be delivered by the boat as the location is across the water. The truck also drives and delivers the non-urgent package to the small clinic.

Conclusion
C3 Flex v2.0 can be used to deliver urgent and non-urgent cargo efficiently by using its auto QR code scanner, mini dispatcher and smart mapper. I believe the C3Flex v2.0 is a smart, cool and innovative solution to solving the problem of medical delivery and similar supply needs.

Bibliography

FLL Cargo Connect Explore Event
Authors: Aahana Joshi, Dhriti Alla, Nirvi Choubey, Ridit Sharma
Date: 01/05/2022