Solar Umbrella (Book 1)

Chapter 7: Planning

CHAPTER SEVEN

IBRAHIM. OF COURSE it would be Ibrahim. Parker was jealous of the guy. He could admit it. It annoyed him, but Kate was right. With DJ and Kate on the coding end, Parker needed another hands-on member to help design and build the robots. The three of them would be fine with ideas, but the execution end would be the challenge. Ibrahim was the obvious, but perfect choice. He had a much better hand at engineering than Parker, especially on small components, which would be a major strength. A teacher had once described Parker, accurately, as a Frankenstein engineer. He was great at welding crap together and attaching strange appendages to things, but fine work and simplifying was not his strong suit. It especially irked him that the two would be working so close, but if that was the price to pay for a trip to the moon...it was an easy decision. Ibrahim seemed hesitant when Parker initially asked him if he was interested, but agreed to join immediately when Parker mentioned the rest of the team. It wasn't the inclusion of DJ that caught his interest. They added Ibrahim to their group planning chat and documents and went from there.

The group all agreed that the "collection of food aspect" was the challenge for them. They all had a basic understanding of chemistry and biology, but nothing on the level to increase yields. They toyed with the idea for a bit from a physical angle—protecting plants from the sun somehow, doing something with water delivery or soil—but they couldn't think of much that would work on a large scale. So, harvesting it would have to be.

"I think it has to be a robotic solution," Parker suggested again. "People are too much work to deal with and too unreliable."

"I agree with Parker on this one. Plus, people would be using more water than the plants out there. You can't have people out in the heat harvesting food. Even at night when you can avoid the sun, it's still too hot," Ibrahim added, nodding along with Parker. "To win this competition, we need to think big time. Worldwide harvesting. I bet lots of teams will enter and look at solutions on a single plant and how you can get 12 oranges from it instead of 11 or whatever. We need to think of the big picture. Kate? DJ?"

They both added their agreement and the team started plotting ideas on a big piece of chart paper. Parker's grandparents used to tell him about a time before tablets and computers when all the work was done on paper. It was funny, after all that time, people still liked writing their ideas down. Sure, they'd distill these ideas down and compile them into a readable format on the computer later, but for now having a big pile of words and images spread about Kate's kitchen table seemed perfect. Parker smiled. This was the work he lived for. There was a problem. They needed a solution. The work of getting from A to Z was when he felt truly like himself—like he was built for this. He remembered his older brothers getting stressed out over big projects in school, and he always wondered why. Just buckle down, think and solve. He hated to admit it, but part of why he loved it was this team. He always worked well with Kate and DJ, but Ibrahim fit right in as well. They all contributed ideas to the overall plan and it ended up being based on their earlier project with the robot from their communications class.

They were going to go with a plan using a number of robots run from a central computer. The computer would map whatever area was needed. For their test, they were going to use a local community garden that was about an acre in size and already had lots of fruit trees and vegetables planted and in various stages of harvest. Part of their plan was showing how the plan could scale up easily to work seamlessly on a farm or city—whatever. This part of the plan would need a lot of coding, which was where DJ and Kate came in. The computer would need to keep track of a lot of variables. Water levels, soil quality, amount of sun, daily temperature and what times were best to harvest a variety of plants. The group talked about extreme variables like heat waves, fires, droughts and other climate disasters, but decided to ultimately stick to a normal scenario for the sake of time. The physical component of the plan was left to Ibrahim and Parker to knock out. The idea was to use a single robot that could get around and monitor the garden all day, every day. It would need to be small and delicate enough to get up and down trees to harvest fruit, but also large enough to carry all the required monitors and the actual food itself.