Senior Design Project

 

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              My senior design project is a multi-purpose robotic arm which we applied to the task of making pancakes. My team and I worked on it over the course of two semesters. We used 3D printed components to construct the arm in addition to other parts and pieces. The arm can dispense pancake batter onto a griddle, and then uses computer vision to detect when the pancakes are done. It then can flip them and serve them. The arm incorporates computer vision into its design. A camera mounted on the arm feeds information back to a computer in the control section of the machine, which then processes the data to tell the arm what to do.

               I worked with a team of four other engineering students from Computer and Electrical Engineering. My specific role was the Electromechanical Specialist. This position suited me well because I like to focus on hardware and tinkering with the relationship between electronics and the physical world. Of course, I also worked closely with my other team members on the other areas of our project. At first I did a lot of research on various design and problem-solving strategies I might use. Then I moved into producing sketches and other documents which were preliminary designs. Once our team agreed on a design we moved into building prototypes and testing. Along the way we tweaked our design as necessary. In the end we had a working proof-of-concept piece.

               The project taught me a lot. I improved my skills for working in groups, especially with people different from myself. I learned about prototyping and testing engineering designs. I had a good experience with developing a project from initial ideas into a finished product. I would say that my research abilities were honed as well; there were times that I had to perform tests to acquire information for myself rather than just getting it from an external resource.

               Aside from the technical duties I had, I was also the meeting scribe. Each Friday morning we had a meeting. I would take notes of the meeting and then afterwards I would email those out to our group members and post it to a common Slack channel. It helped keep everyone on the same page and also document our process.