For the Design School of Lund School of Engineering course “Project: Machine Design” together with a group of 3 other people, we were entrusted with the redesign of a basket lift for supermarkets called “L-avate”, from a company called Mindsystems.

The aim of the machine is to help elderly people when carrying the large baskets in the supermarket to the counter. Usually people have to either lift the basket with all the goods and place it in the counter, or bend over to take all of the goods. With this elevator the person just puts the basket in the lift and presses a button that then will take the basket to the height of the counter.

We redesigned the machine to successfully make it smaller and quieter. We also added proximity sensors to the top of the machine to allow multiple sizes of baskets to be used and still get the basket to the right height.

The group members were: Sara Roos (Sweden), Rainy Tang (China), Timothy van Dalsen (Australia) and me.

Front of the machine.

Photo of the back of the machine without the back sheet on

The inside of the machine shows two arduinos conected to a controller board, a motor and two power sources.

Front of the machine with a basket on it.