Personal Item Management System

In today's world, human's living space is taken up by 3 main components: storage space, open space, and functional space. For example in a kitchen, storage space consists of pantry, fridge, and cabinets; and functional space consists of space taken up by the stove, oven and other appliances that perform necessary functions. As the world gets more and more populous, there is less and less desirable living space for every individual. The solution to this problem is to relocate storage space from its central and easily accessible location in people's houses to a less desirable and less accessible location. That doesn't make any sense though, doing that would undermine the purpose of storage space, which is a storage location for commonly accessible objects in the first place. Personal Item Management System or PIMS is an automated home management system. The purpose of PIMS is to store, acquire, and deliver various items that are needed in people's daily lives. A sample application is the kitchen, instead of storing items in the pantry and cabinets which occupies a lot of space in the kitchen, why not store those objects downstairs such as the basement where no-one would want to use as living space? This is where PIMS would be located and it would classify, sort, and store these items. When the user needs a pot, PIMS would retrieve this item from the basement storage area and deliver it to the kitchen via an elevator that services the kitchen. This would significantly free up usable square footage in the kitchen for people to cook, eat and spend time with family. If this PIMS is scaled up to cover an entire single family home with every room having its own item delivery point, the need for closets and cabinets in the primary living space will cease to exist. By using this management system, users can use a tablet to select their outfit for the day and have it delivered before they get out of bed in the futures smart home. PIMS becomes extremely useful when it is applied to a city environment. What if an entire high-rise building that houses hundreds of people have a centralized PIMS system located in the basement of the building. This will increase the living capacity of the building by opening up more space and therefore reducing the amount of space each individual needs to live a comfortable life. However when a system as impactful on peoples daily lives like PIMS is scaled to this level, there will be obvious problems. The first and very most important is security of the items being stored. People are basically depositing all of their belongings into a bank with little knowledge of how secure their items will be. This issue can be alleviated by having various grades of security depending on item value and size. PIMS could be scaled to everywhere from factories, to warehouses, and even entire cities. Imagine if Atlanta is connected by one PIMS system, mail could be delivered through it, people could send things instantly to friends 20 miles away, and more people can live in the same amount of living space because of the elimination of storage space. PIMS could revolutionize the way how peoples live their lives, and it all starts at the very basic concept of intelligent item management. The PIMS example shown in the CAD is representative of what a 2 bedroom apartment would need in terms of storage space. It works on a rack and rail system. This means items are stored on storage racks in smart boxes that have NFC chips and vision targets on them so the retrieve mechanism can easily retrieve items from the racks. The racks are on slider rails and are driven by threaded rod. The rod is driven by a chain drive that has a a dog gear clutch that can be engaged and disengaged by a pneumatic piston to decide when a shelf should slide out so the retrieval mechanism can retrieve the designated item. The retrieval system is also mounted on the same rail system but it uses timing belts and pulleys to move up and down, forward and backward. This was chosen because of its relative low cost and lightness of a belt and pulley system. The actual retrieval system is a robotic arm with 2 degrees of freedom. One of these degrees of freedom is a pneumatic piston that changes the hook from retrieve to retain setting. The second degree of freedom allows the arm to angle its ignorer to drop the item to the retrieval devices storage bay. This storage device then drops off the items it retrieved to the delivery system that will deliver the items to the user. In the design the storage boxes were all deigned to have the same dimensions. In practical use, there would be various sizes and specialty containers for different items. For example clothing would have a specialized area that is a hanger system instead of a box storage method. PIMS can be modified and adapted to various use cases from organizing nuclear material too toxic for human exposure to sorting a chef's spices. PIMS has an endless amount of use cases for today's and tomorrow's world. As of right now, there are several key flaws that prevent PIMS from getting installed in every house and building in the world. First the cost of a PIMS system is currently too high for the average consumer to afford. This issue will be solved over time as the cost of parts goes down just like how 3D printers have gone from 5 figure machines to 250 dollar toys. The second problem is what if a PIMS system fails, today almost nothing this complex has 100% run time. As of right now, there is no real realistic solution to this problem. Finally integrating PIMS into today's infrastructure will require a radical redesign in how we construct houses and buildings. The initial adoption fo this system will be low and until the system has been extensively proven, consumers and contractors will be conformable in making an investment in such a system. PIMS can change the way people live their day to day lives, by changing just one major aspect, how people store their stuff without wasting valuable living space and retrieve the items quickly and accurately as needed.