REFLECTION

TEAM WORK AND DYNAMICS

Teams are my favorite part of design projects because of the growth and bonding that seems to always come each semester. I went into this semester as a total stranger to my team and came out as friends. I love seeing team members begin to take ownership for their contributions, and how people become experts in specific domains of the project, giving them purpose and value. When the group first met, we had to navigate the dynamic of differing cultures, experience, and understanding, but as the project pressed on, we became a more and more cohesive team with immense respect for each other's strengths. My main role in the team was the leader, but I used my 8 years of design experience to help problem solve very effectively when things went wrong. My experience also helped when planning budgets and timelines so that we would stay on track. I also love CAD and I love to build, so being able to bring those strengths to the team made me proud and confident in our design.

LEADERSHIP

Leadership has always been a natural role and strength for me, so I took the role very early on in our team meetings to help optimize the time spent together. This semester I improved my meeting facilitation skills by being sure that each team member's ideas are heard and that conversation stays reasonably in the scope of the meeting agenda. I also learned to better manage communication across language barriers. It was a wonderful growing experience to enter into the cross-culture leadership role and help each team member feel confident in their role. Delegation was another skill exercised this semester, since there was truly too much to be done by one person. I enjoyed delegating based on strengths and interests on the team, and coming together to share and update each other during meetings. I learned to facilitate brainstorming and problem-solving, by being the one to pull out the notepad and sketch or jot down notes. I also strengthened my time management skills this semester as I organized meeting times and helped us all be together when we needed to be. My biggest growth point as a leader this year, however, was in understanding and affecting team morale and dynamics. I saw first-hand the power of affirmation and team pride in our group, and I took opportunities to acknowledge work well-done. All these things came together to be a great semester of learning to bring very different people together to have fun and be excited about a project (and do well!).

MECHANICAL DESIGN

We learned about gear trains in class, and I used these lessons directly in my project in order to design an effective gear train and calculate the speed of the walker. I was the designer of the simple cam mechanism used in our automaton's arms, and I used principles and inspiration videos directly from class to help the design process. I opted for simplicity and ease of manufacture in our design, so I didn't factor in much PVA analysis or extensive design principles, but our result was a very reliable cam that was easy and low-cost to manufacture. PVA analysis did however prove to be very useful in the leg mechanism, and I was able to apply what was taught in class and in lab to understand better how our legs would move our drummer. This was important to our design and anticipating the success during the competition, and I am looking forward to being able to apply my understanding of PVA analysis to cams and linkage mechanisms in future projects and systems that I'm designing in order to optimize and predict the performance. Also learning about graphical linkage synthesis, especially the Hrones & Nelson curves was really interesting and I learned most of that from lab. It was great to be able to see and literally choose the path I wanted and then be able to recreate mechanisms that are already tested and understood. Planar kinematics was helpful when understanding the degrees of freedom in our prototype, but since we used a very common linkage (Klann mechanism), we didn't use this in application as much as we did in our homework assignments. Knowing the concepts of planar kinematics was really helpful to just have a grasp of what the linkages are doing and how changing certain dimensions affects the mechanism. Dynamic Force analysis was used to analyze the forces on the system and to be sure that the design for our walker would actually work. By working through extensive Matlab code in the lab sessions, we were able to do these calculations on our own design. We also used analysis of energy methods and the method of instantaneous centers to do some extra analysis on our system, but it was not directly used in the design considerations for this project since those methods were learned and practiced later in the course.

PROTOTYPING

Th prototyping in this course started in low-fidelity models made of cardboard and popsicle sticks and hot glue. This was a really fun was to experiment with mechanisms and color and design without having to get too technical, and it really played into my creative strengths well. We then transitioned into higher fidelity prototyping and I learned how to use the laser cutting machine while improving on my 3D printing and woodshop skills form previous projects. The prototyping process is important and stressful at times, but my main takeaway is that sometimes it's best just to get something out there that you can see and play with so that you can optimize most effectively and let the creativity bleed more and more into the design.

PRESENTATION

I have had a lot of fun this semester learning how to present our project and work well through photos, videos, and graphic design. My camera is full of photos and videos of our little drummer boy, and it's brought me such joy to decorate and bring this robot to life and be able to show him off through different medias. It was also really great to get to get good pictures of the team at work throughout the semester, and it really helped add to the sense of team pride and excitement that grew throughout the semester.

DIFFICULTIES

Some of the my weaknesses in this project were on the analysis side of the design. I focused more on the problem-solving and the creative design, so when it came to the matlab, PVA, and DFA parts, I had some catching up to do in our project. Another difficulty my team faced was scheduling conflicits. We very rarely could all meet at the same time, so we had to get good at communicating via email and organizing files well online so that even if only two of us could meet, we could still work efficiently and effectively.

APPLICATION

I'm really excited to take what I've learned here about teams, leadership, mechanical design, and prototyping to my work as a supply chain engineer at PepsiCo. The things I've learned about how to work with people are invaluable, and I know that my creativity and problem-solving skills will help tremendously in my work as a professional engineer. Also the ways that I've learned how to learn more about mechanisms and analysis will be helpful. I am grateful for the time I've spent learning how to analyze mechanisms such as the leg linkages and how I'll be able to use those skills and understanding to analyze plant machinery at PepsiCo and optimize its processes.

THE COURSE

ME 370 was taught by a wonderfully affirming professor, Leon Liebenberg. He helped inspire creativity in a way that is rare in engineering courses, and I really loved being in the course and working on the project. The main strength of the course was the inspiration and the way that other resources were encouraged and displayed in each lecture, like videos of automaton art and of design thinking techniques and of good team skills. The homework assignments and labs were often deceptively challenging, and it was often difficult to find helpful resources, so I would cite this as the main weakness of the course, but the professor's attitude toward learning and project processes was truly very exciting and inspiring.