Lab 8 – PT1

Over the course of the eight labs so far, the team has put significant effort into designing the AEV and learned several important lessons along the way. One important takeaway has to do with dematerialization. Early on, the team noted that there appeared to be significant space on the body of the AEV not being used by anything, and that it would help to come up with a more efficient design. Over the course of designing and testing each team member’s draft AEV design, the team learned that by removing excess weight and mass from the vehicle and by moving components closer to the center of the vehicle to consolidate the center of mass, the vehicle’s efficiency, stability and overall performance could all be improved. Another important takeaway has to do with dividing and delegating work during lab periods. Initially, every member of the team helped construct the AEV at the same time, and used TeamViewer to work on the code together. Soon, however, technical issues impeded the progress of the AEV and the code. After several lab periods, the team realized that they were progressing much more slowly than desired because of these issues. The solution was to come up with more clearly defined team roles and split up tasks during each lab. With this approach, if one group or teammate is impeded by problems with the hardware or software, the rest are able to keep working and the team will still have made progress by the end of the lab. This concept has proven itself to be successful multiple times over the past few weeks – while issues with the Arduino software and the battery slowed progress for one team member, the others were able to keep working on their tasks and had made clear progress at the end of the lab. This week in the lab, the team hopes to focus on two major areas –  turn balance and overall stability, and center of gravity. These two concepts will likely be fairly simple to test and improve, and also are fairly dependent on one another, making them an obvious choice to focus on for this week. The AEV’s design is already meant to consolidate the center of gravity, so while the vehicle will likely already perform well in this regard it is also crucial to work on improving this. Despite their apparent simplicity, these two concepts are also of vital significance, since stability issues around the corner can cause the AEV to have issues with distances and efficiency – or worse, it could fall off the track altogether. By focusing on these two concepts this week, the team hopes to lay solid groundwork for further testing after break.

Team Notes

March 2, 2017 – PT 1 

Teammates present: Iskandar Roslen, Jacob Jeffers, Abhishekh Kumar, Vince Le

Objective: Complete PDR presentation, decide who takes AEV, decide who begins to make AEV parts

Decisions: Vincent will take the AEV to experiment and measure to create AEV parts

To-do/Action items: Generate CAD models for AEV parts, complete test code for running AEV

Reflections:

This week the team decided on a few things. The team was able to set a schedule and decide on a design for the AEV. This is great because parts are now able to be designed and cut. We are hopeful to stay on the schedule and produce a great AEV.

Schedule