Critical Design Report

Executive Summary:

This semester of Engineering 1182 was built around the AEV, or Advance Energy Vehicle, design project. The project involved our team of four students designing, programming, and testing a small electrical vehicle. Teams are tasked to find an efficient way for the galactic empire to transport their R2D2’s from one remote planet to the other. The vehicle itself was suspended by a wheeled arm, which was propelled along a monorail by a set of propellers. The control center for the vehicle was the Arduino device mounted on the base, which attached to the battery, sensors, and propeller motors. The goal of the project was to teach students how to work together in groups, as well as other engineering topics like wind power, aerodynamics, and sketching concept models.  Every week the team would complete a lab focusing on a different part of the project, generally design or testing. Each week’s progress was recorded using a project website and summarized in a weekly progress report.

The team started its testing using a standard reference AEV design. After several weeks of data collection, the team used brainstorming techniques to create new designs, narrowing them down to two and then one composite design to test with. This composite design morphed into our final design over the course of the following labs. The final design kept the strengths of the reference and composite designs while improving the balance issues and shedding unnecessary material. Overall, the process of refining the final design went smoothly. There were some mistakes in design that were scrapped, and others that we decided were too ambitious, but little time was lost to these errors, and the final efficient design organically developed out of its predecessors.

Our group decided to prioritize the track completion time, partially at the cost of energy efficiency.  The AEV did not coast into the gates, but ran the propeller motors in reverse to act as a brake. This allowed the vehicle to travel in between gates much quicker, and also made the code much more reliable. This new method gave the team a far more robust code, freeing members to focus on the most problematic sections of the track.

The final model of our AEV and the final code were then tested on the inside monorail in room 224. Two runs took place, and the group chose to be graded based on the more efficient second run, which used less energy and did not require manual aid from group members during the run. This final test successfully finished the track, but the group was disappointed by the average course time and high energy output. Although the AEV finished the track without incident, the team’s final score was reduced by the vehicle’s high energy output as well as the other groups’ comparatively high scores.