The goal of preliminary research and development was for the team members to gain familiarity with an Arduino and its programming interface. During this phase, the team was also able to experiment with various designs of an AEV in order to produce a final AEV that would be further tested. To create this final design of the AEV, the team compared their individual designs and analyzed pros and cons to each to determine the most efficient design. Specifics about each week of the preliminary R&D phase can be found below: