Budget
Summary of Budget
Our robot cost £108.51 to prototype. For a production-ready system, we would need to replace our robotic arm with a version strong enough to lift real library books. Therefore we estimate that a production-ready system would cost £5,662.01.
Taking into account our market and competitors' (detailed in the Market Research section below), we would sell our robot for £13,000 or offer a leasing option of £1000 per month. Our selling price would give us a 200% markup while also keeping our price below our competitors, giving us a competitive entry advantage.
Development Budget (Prototype)
This subsection details our costs incurred during the development process of the System Design Project.
Production Budget
This subsection details our costs if we were to put our product into production. The main cost difference comes from the replacement of the Robotic Arm used in prototyping with a stronger version capable of lifting real library books. Additional costs for customisation have been added, where the buyer can attach their own colours or logos to BookBot's storage box.
Additional costs for assembly and repairing have been introduced to ensure the product is thoroughly tested and maintained for the buyer.
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One thing to note is in a real production scenario, we may opt to manufacture our own parts instead of using existing products such as the Turtlebot. This would significantly reduce our total cost, and allow for extra customisation of the design.
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Pricing
Taking into account our market and competitors', we propose to sell our robot for £23,000 or offer a leasing option of £2,500 per month. Our selling price would give us a 300% markup while also keeping our price below our competitors, giving us a competitive entry advantage.
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Please find more details about our Market, Competitors and Pricing in the Market Research section below.
Market Research
Researching market demand
Growing demand for Librarians & Automation
Employment studies find that the Librarian job market is expected to grow in the next 10 years. Furthermore, a recent study confirms that US institutions seek librarians who are familiar with library automated systems and computer databases. With this skill set, librarians are transitioning into roles as system analysts, database specialists, local area network (LAN) coordinators, and web developers. Therefore, our technological product comes at the right time to match the libraries’ transition towards automation.
Customer Satisfaction influenced by Tech & Ease of finding books
A recent customer satisfaction study on academic libraries finds that amongst the most important reasons for customer satisfaction in a library are: “Ease of use/convenient access to library collection”; “Being helped in the process of finding information”; “Access to electronic databases/ digital collection to find information”, validating the need for BookBot.
Competition
Having used relatively new technologies, BookBot is the first product on the market that can fetch and deliver books to users inside a library, though similar alternative products do exist.
In a recent academic project, students from Aberystwyth University have developed HUGH, an artificially intelligent library catalogue which can take verbal requests and navigate users to the relevant bookshelf. HUGH does not provide any book recognition or delivery capabilities, and is still an ongoing project.
Pepper is a popular social humanoid able to socially interact with humans through conversations and its touch screen. Although Pepper does not provide any capabilities for book recognition or delivery, it is available in over 2,000 companies around the world as an assistant to welcome, inform and guide visitors. Pepper is currently being sold at $30,000.
AuRoss, a very similar product developed by researchers at Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research is capable of scanning shelves for misplaced books using RFID tags. AuRoss is still a product under development, and there are no confirmations of book recognition or delivery.
In 2019, Google released the “Google BookBot”, an autonomous vehicle which could navigate around and deliver books which had to be manually placed inside the robot. The product has been discontinued.