Design and Manufacturing Lab

During the spring 2019 semester I had the opportunity to take the University of Florida's design and manufacturing laboratory course. The main goal of this course is to introduce students to the engineering design process from finding a need for a product to generating concepts to prototyping and testing. A large amount of this work included creating a fully detailed CAD model and part drawing set to manufacture necessary components utilizing traditional manufacturing processes (mill, lathe, shear, brake, etc...).

Our task was to design a robot that could pick up a bucket with 10 balls (5 tennis and 5 golf balls), sort these balls, and dispense them into two goal buckets. There were various ramps and other obstacles in the arena that the robot had to traverse in order to reach the balls.

Below is an image of our robot on competition day. Many last minute changes were made to ensure the robot was fully functional, testing our ability to work toward a solution given stringent deadlines and completion dates. Additionally, we were successful at staying below our $50 budget for consumable stock materials, coming in nearly 15% below budget. This required multiple meetings throughout the design and fabrication processes to trim away excess material or simplify mechanisms wherever possible.

Every student in the group was tasked to initially create a concept for this robot prior to being placed in teams. This allowed every team to choose from multiple designs for every sub assembly of the robot to create a more well rounded final product. Appendix A was a document we created to help decide where every design had its strengths. Our Justifications document took various visual representations of the designs and explained why our choices were made. Appendix B shows our expected time calculations for all four mobile platform designs, as used in the justifications for our Mobile Platform selection. Once we had a general idea of our robot's design, we began to spec out our motors. Appendix C shows our calculations for this, to ensure that our robot would successfully traverse the course and perform its required movements.