Creative Decisions and Design

Creative Decisions and Design is a sophomore Mechanical Engineering class in which students are instructed in the creative engineering design and problem solving process through various team projects. The main project, which lasts the last month of the semester, is to build an autonomous robot to complete certain given tasks. Teams compete their robots against each other to see who accomplished the tasks most effectively.

In my team of four, I mainly worked on keeping an updated CAD model of the design so that it could be constructed and tweaked easily. I chose Fusion 360 for making the CAD model since modeling the motion of the robot is very simple and intuitive with the Joints tool. Additionally, I used LabView to program the MyRIO controller that tells the robot what to do and when to do it.

Teams were also tasked with keeping logs of design progress and decision making in the form of weekly reports. Our team placed 9th overall in the competition with over 70 teams, and it was one of my proudest moments as a student! A video describing the competition and our design process is below: