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Investigating the hazards of grocery delivery

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Category: research Video duration: Investigating the hazards of grocery delivery
Collegiate Assistant Professor Eduardo Molina and a group of his undergraduate students are investigating the hazards that grocery packages experience during last-mile delivery to customers, by designing and assembling instrumented packages and sending them through the supply chain.
When you have the traditional grocery purchasing processes, you go to the store and you pick up your own product. As soon as you buy it, you have the full control of it. Well, what's happening now is that last-mile delivery process, that supply chain from the grocery store to the way that consumers receive the product has been changing dramatically in the last few years because of that, people are buying objects to different, different channel. And what happens is, this is not very well known, not very well mapped for packaging. Employee picture stuff, packs your order and then delivers that are prepared, The pickup, how are they handled by pickers and store? How are they handled by delivery drivers? How are they handled by you, the customer, and how are those different? We don't know exactly what path or it might be there. Is the product going to be exposed to very high temperatures or will be dropping one, put it in the doorstep in front of your home, right? If they're dropping it from very far away, that might be damaging the product. Dropping. All clear, We're working on a project from an international organization that is interested in knowing more about the organization focused on transportation packaging. Students are going through the store, interviewing the work for the interview and learning about what type of handling the product experiences. And on the other side, we're also grabbing the code packages are the ones that we've been working on here and submitting them through that last-mile delivery brought. The idea is that it's just the same as something you'd buy in the store, but ours, instead of having actual food or something and then it's going to have a sensor inside that flexed and drop in vibration data. The one specific dummy package that we've made is to fit a, a diaper box. So we've got the sensor and then we've got something to hold the sensor in place. So we have a friction fit box that's centering it and holding it tight with just foam. And then for the diaper box, you've got a metal frame and then it's attached to a plywood sheets and then it's put in a corrugated box. It's a very precision, but it needs to be extremely snug. Otherwise you risk gathering incorrect orientation data or reducing drops is like vibrations. Vibrations as drops. As the product is moved throughout the system, will be recording whether it gets dropped with a reduced some vibration that might be a hassle for the product itself, right? And then, um, we're matching that data with the mapping of the process so we can know now whether we want to target the processing company might be more careful in certain parts of the objects or packaging engineers and grab the information and start rethinking the design process.