The team had to brainstorm ideas to decide what they valued the most to conduct their advanced research on. Below are some of the ideas they developed. They ended up focusing on Precision/Accuracy and Assembly time.
- Battery Efficiency/Voltage
- See how much strain operating our vehicle puts on battery
- Precision and Accuracy
- Try to get vehicle to stop where needed
- Assembly
- Simplify pieces
- Easy access to battery
- Don’t have small, easy misplaced pins
- Speed/Acceleration
- Find the most efficient speed to get the job done but making sure the craft is still safe and doesn’t kill the battery
- Faster time
- Safety
- Keep vehicle on track entire time/Don’t let it fall
- Slow down around curves
- Mass
- Keep vehicle itself light so most of its weight is from the caboose
- Make wings shorter
- Shorten tail/ make caboose be tail
- Distribute weight evenly so it stays on the track
- Different Propellers
Advanced R&D
Below shows the teams initial hypothesis about how they assumed their experimenting would conclude. Then it shows they actual collected data.
Time to Dismantle Craft
Our team has chosen to focus on how quickly we can put together and take apart our vehicle. We choose this as one of our most important aspects because we do not want to waste a lot of time putting together a complex craft that takes more time putting together and taking apart this it does running on the track. Having a simple set up just containing pins will help tremendously. It’ll take a few minutes rather than half of class time when we when could be focus our efforts on more important issues and aspects. We expect to get faster the more we get used to it, improving our time with every assembly.
| Number of Trials | Average Time | Process |
| 1 | 96 secs | Removing 6 screws |
| 2 | 10 secs | Dry Fit |
| 3 | 12 secs | Removing pins |
Accuracy and Precision
Our team also thought one of the most important things our craft needs to be able to do is to stop where we want it to every time. This will help us both in the track testing and in a real-world scenario. We want our vehicle to get as close as we can to our predestined target every time, we send it out on its missions. If this aspect was completely ignored, then our vehicle could stop inches (miles in real world) from its destination and our efficiency would decrease with every bad delivery. Our company would stop getting customers and we’d have to reprogram and adapt anyways, so why not do it right the first time. We expect to get more accurate and precise with every reprogramming we do.
| Trial | Inches Away from Stop Sign |
| 1 | 3.3 |
| 2 | 5.6 |
| 3 | 6.1 |
