Engineering Design Process for Robot Attachments

We use a 5-step engineering design process for constructing our robot attachments. However, before we start the design process, we first need to determine whether the attachment is going to be a passive or motorized attachment. If it’s passive then we need to know where it is going to attach on to the robot. If it’s motorized, we need to have a motor that can connect our attachment to the robot.

Here's the engineering design process that we follow:

1. Know the restrictions: Some examples of restrictions for attachments are like it can’t extend outside of the base at start and it can’t be more than 12 inches tall.

2. Sketch a picture: Once we know our restrictions and whether it’s going to be a passive or motorized attachment, we can sketch a brief drawing of it.

3. Build: Based on our sketch of the attachment, we can build it using LEGO technic blocks.

4. Test: Once we have the attachment built and know what mission it is going to be accomplishing, we can use the LEGO Mindstorms app on our computer to program the robot and test out the attachment.

5. Refine & Document: After we test out the attachment, we watch where it goes wrong and refine the attachment or the program in the final step. One technique we used to refine was using video-based review. We would take a slow motion video of the robot accomplishing the task and we could then zoom in to see where the attachment was going wrong and what we need to do to fix it. Once we have finalized the design, we document it.