Reflections

(left to right) Brendon Tankwa, Maria Sottile, Bereket Guta, Jessica Ma

Overall lessons learned and skills developed as a team:

1. Working independently while contributing to a team effort
2. Project management - setting goals, timelines and trying to stick with to them while being flexible to adapt to new information
3. Attention to detail so as to minimize error in order to work within the time constraints
4. Debugging and finding the root cause of a problem
5. Approaching problems from a “first principles” viewpoint to avoid technical debt
6. Grit in figuring things out after multiple attempts

Maria

For a lot of our robot, we worked individually, and occasionally our work overlapped; better communication could have made our work more efficient and improved our designs through greater collaboration. Many of our components went through several iterations before we decided on a final design, and while some of the this was necessary, a lot of mistakes could have been avoided if we worked more carefully to plan things out in greater detail.

I learned not only about how to work on and manage a project with other people, but also about how to make myself an easier person to work with.

Jessica

We wanted a robot that was modular, one that could be taken apart easily and worked on separately. We did accomplish that, but we didn’t spend enough time making sure that the parts we made were still designed for each other. As the competition approached, we ended up spending too much time trying to integrate everything, and not as much on testing and making things robust.

Making the claw was a fantastic experience because I got to do a little bit of everything: mechanical design, fabrication, electrical connections/power, and software. I learned many valuable lessons (the hard way) about the importance of not relying on epoxy, the beauty of sheet metal, and current-greedy servo motors.

Bereket

This experience has taught me the lesson that a simple and robust design is most often the best design overall. We had several technical issues early on when we were coming up with ways to implement out first gap-crossing technique. We required a tremendous amount of torque and needed to have every component in the mechanism secured down so that it was robust and reliable. This proved to be a challenge and as time went on, we saw the time commitment required for this single mechanism rise. Thus, in the end, we decided on using a simpler bridge dropping method to save on much needed time to work on other modules of the robot.

Brendon

Working effectively in a team environment was a key learning point. We had to adapt to each others’ learning and working styles with very little time and under significant pressure. Setting goals and tasks to be done was an evolving process and by eating lunch together every day we were able to consolidate our thoughts.

Some invaluable engineering principles were learnt: coming up with a schematic for your work before prototyping, following debugging best practices, and a first-principles approach to problem solving. Specific to this project, we learnt that it was critical to make sure that our circuitry was firm, and our mechanical system was robust before proceeding to writing software. Also, developing the circuits was fun, because afterward, you could turn on a switch and see a certain component of your robot come to life.