Orange Sparkle Ball was awarded a Real World Deployment Grant from the Michigan Economic Development Corporation's Office of Future Mobility and Electrification. This grant is enabling us to put our Autonomous Robotic Pickup Platform into action through a series of pilots in the Transportation Innovation Zone of Detroit, established by the Office of Mobility Innovation at The City of Detroit.

Orange Sparkle Ball is an innovation and impact accelerator sitting at the junction of research, technology, human-centered design principles, and organizational goals. Orange Sparkle Ball creates organization and community-focused innovation programs, runs data-driven pilots to demonstrate proof of the future state, creates multi-faceted communication strategies to stakeholders, and develops environments that support progress toward key metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs). Experience with government, industry, technology startups, public/private partnerships, and academia allows Orange Sparkle Ball to provide a full ecosystem approach to customized solutions. For this Autonomous Robotic Pickup Platform, OSB will be the strategy lead with a focus on platform and pilot strategy, management, and planning as well as management and alignment of pilot partners.

The team at Orange Sparkle Ball has extensive experience working with startups in the autonomous robotics space and have leveraged our network to acquire technology partners for this pilot platform. We're currently engaged with Ottonomy, Refraction, and Intermode who will be providing the technology hardware and software for the 4 respective pilots we plan to conduct as a part of this platform. For community partners, we've been engaging with local startups and businesses who have existing operations collecting end-of-life materials (such as food waste, non-traditional recyclables, etc.) that could benefit from leveraging robotic pickup to streamline their operations. We're currently engaged with Scrap Soils and Brother Nature Farm for our first pilot surrounding the pickup of food waste. Our intention is to run all 4 pilots in the Transportation Innovation Zone established by the City of Detroit's Office of Mobility Innovation, so we've also been working with OMI to identify community partners. Finally, we're working with local neighborhood associations and community groups to recruit interested participants for the pilots.
To finance this pilot platform, OSB received a Real World Deployment grant from the State of Michigan, specifically the Office of Future Mobility and Electrification. The pilot platform will run through November 2024. Our goals for this platform will be to understand the long-term logistics and market for the autonomous pickup of materials as well as the overall benefit this platform could provide to the city of Detroit. More specifically, we hope to understand (1) the process and complexities associated with pickup of various types of end-of-life materials and (2) the community benefit and interest for each selected use case as well as how compounded offerings could influence platform use.

For more information, we will be continuously adding to this page on our website as the platform progresses.

Written by Hannah Ranieri, Innovation Strategist