Summer 2024 Application for the Software Team of the Machine Intelligence Laboratory

Hello! Thanks for checking our lab, we appreciate your interest in applying to work with us. To gauge the skills of our software members, we ask all incoming applicants to complete a short coding challenge to assess their skills at programming. This helps us ensure that all our members have a baseline requisite of experience.

Challenge

You are going to develop an inventory management system for managing robotics parts and inventory. Most robotics are composed of hundreds or thousands of parts, which will eventually break, get lost, or need backups. Therefore, you'll demonstrate your coding proficiency by developing an inventory management system for MIL.

Managing parts and inventory is a significant challenge at MIL, especially for our electrical and mechanical teams. We have thousands of parts in our lab and realizing that we are out of a certain component right when we need it can be a disastrous situation!

Terminology

• Part: An individual, unique item that can be used to support a robotic system. If two items they have the exact same characteristics, they are the same "part." For example, a "3ft Black HDMI cable" is a part.

• SKU: "Stock Keeping Unit". Each SKU is associated with a specific, unique "part". An equivalent SKU indicates an equivalent part. Typically, a SKU is a integer, but there is no necessary requirement for the datatype of the SKU.

Specification

• The number of parts your inventory management system could be tested with is 1 < parts < 1,000,000.

• There is no required public API/interface for your program, to provide you creative and design flexibility. You can design a public C++ API, a REST API, a Python API, a serial interface, etc. To convey what you have implemented you must document your API.

Part Characteristics

Each part is associated with a "class" of parts (resistors, solders, etc.). The class determines the necessary properties of the part.

Each part should have a "Last Updated Date" property (date with time) representing the most recent time that some quantity of that part was added to the inventory. Each property of a part must be of the necessary type, or your API should error out.

• Resistor

  • Resistance (ohms, integer-type)

  • Tolerance (number, integer-type)

• Solder

  • Type (enumerator of lead, lead-free, rosin-core, acid-core)

  • Length (ft, decimal-type)

• Wire

  • Gauge (in, decimal-type)

  • Length (ft, decimal-type)

• Display Cable

  • Type (enumerator of hdmi, vga, displayport, micro-hdmi)

  • Length (ft, decimal-type)

  • Color (hex code)

• Ethernet Cables

  • Alpha Type (enumerator of male, female)

  • Beta Type (enumerator of male, female)

  • Speed (enumerator of 10mbps, 100mbps, 1gbps, 10gbps)

  • Length (ft, decimal-type)

Necessary Methods

• Add Part

  • Parameters: All necessary characteristics to describe the part.

• Add Inventory

  • Parameters: SKU, quantity

  • Adds a certain quantity of SKU to the available inventory. Note that this will need to update the "Last Updated Date" property of the part.

• Get Quantity

  • Parameters: SKU

  • Returns the quantity of the SKU.

• Get Inventory

  • Parameters: None

  • Returns all parts and their quantity in the lab.

• Get Part

  • Parameters: SKU

  • Returns the characteristics of the part belonging to the SKU

• Search

  • Parameters: Class, and relevant characteristics

  • Allows a user to search through the parts inventory for a necessary part based on the necessary characteristics. Returns a list of all parts that have at least one of the searched-by characteristics.

• Delete Part

  • Parameters: SKU

  • Completely removes a part with the designated SKU

Errors

Your interface should be resilient to common errors. A list of every possible error would be too exhaustive for this document, but some initial ones you might want to consider include:

• What happens if a user tries to add a negative quantity of an item?

• What happens if a user tries to get the quantity of a non-existent SKU?

• What happens if a user fails to provide all necessary characteristics to accurately describe a part?

• What happens if a user tries to add a new part with the exact same characteristics of another part?

Do not assume intended behavior if one of these situations occur -- throw an error instead. How you implement the error handling of your program will vary based on your program type, but it should contain a human-readable message with a description of what went wrong.

Testing

Part of working on a robot is ensuring that it meets set standards for reliability and robustness. Therefore, you will need to develop some tests for your API. How you go about testing your API is up to you, and of course, it will depend on the interface that you choose.

However, alongside reviewing your code, we will be testing your API via the documentation you provide, so we highly encourage adding some tests to ensure that your program will work well under a variety of conditions.

Optional Features

If you're interested in implementing optional features in your interface, here are some ideas of components you could add:

1. Authentication -- Requiring users to authenticate before using the API. This would allow you to store an additional field on each Part with who last updated the part.

2. Analytics -- Ability to create graphs highlighting which parts are most used, and which parts commonly fall out of stock.

3. Webhooks/Event Notifications -- Notifying users about updates to parts could be helpful for notifying users of important information (ex, a part going out of stock) before it happens.

Authentication

Authentication for your API is not required. It can be implemented if you would like.

Submission

You will submit your code through a Git repository, via GitHub. Please create a new repository under your account, set it to private, and then add the following users: cbrxyz (Cameron Brown), andrew-aj (Andrew Knee), and DaniParr (Daniel Parra) so we can review your work.

Furthermore, remember to complete the full application at https://mil.ufl.edu/apply.

Documentation

Because of the flexibility in how you can design your API, you must document how we can go about using it. There are no exact design requirements, but we would like you to include the following somewhere in your documentation:

1. How each method can be called via your API.

2. Some brief examples of using your API and the expected response.

3. The overall design of your API, why you chose to implement with a certain interface over another one.

Assessment

Your submission will be assessed primarily based on your ability to:

1. Develop a complete API that implements all the requirements (listed above)

2. Develop a comprehensible, clear solution that can be understood by us when we review your work

3. Test and validate your API by showing its capability to withstand errors and misuse

4. Document and write about the capabilities of your interface

Questions/Comments/Concerns?

Feel free to reach out to us anytime. Our emails can be found here:

1. Cameron Brown, [email protected]

2. Andrew Knee, [email protected]

3. Daniel Parra, [email protected]

If you have questions about your application, feel free to reach out to us via email. If you would like to join our Discord, please email one of us for the invitation link.

We look forward to seeing all your submissions!

- Cameron, Andrew, Daniel, and everyone at MIL