Preliminary Design Report

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. 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 final design to test with. The final design kept the strengths of the reference design 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.

The biggest problem our group faced was a persistent sensor issue. Multiple pairs of reflectance sensors did not accurately count, or would not remain consistent in their counting. They would double count, triple count, or refuse to count, as well as switching direction at random. In scientific terms, those early sensors lacked both accuracy and precision. Eventually the AEV was looked over and new sensors were installed which performed well enough for the group. There was still variation, but little enough that a good code could overcome it. Our two current codes have been structured with this weakness in mind. Our group faced another, less technical hurdle after we lost one of our members when he switched majors and dropped the class. To compensate, the remaining members have increased their individual workload by assuming our former member’s responsibilities.

The current and final model for our AEV has been completed. Moving forward, the goals for Group K are to continue refining our codes, and creating a final code that will be robust enough to handle any unforeseen changes during the run. Our group is extremely proud of the project’s current progress and feels prepared for the final phases of testing for our AEV.