Robot Design Project

First I'm going to post some potential robot designes we made on graph paper:

Final design:

Design Pros: The complexity of our design ensures that little mistakes will be made while the machine is sorting marbles

Did not take up that much space compared to other robot designs in the class

Besides pistons, the lack of moving parts lowered the chance for something to go wrong.

Design cons: the heavy reliance on pneumatics made the tubing requirements very high for our project, and we probably could hae done it more efficiently.

Having so many pistons also made our machine somewhat slow, while it did make the 2 minute mark, it just barely did so

I think this activity was interesting because it showed me how important long-term planning and forward thinking are to a design process. I noticed this because we just kind of started building our machine without even knowing what the whole thing was going to look like in the end, which forced us the have to do some re-designes late in the process. This lack of planning is also what led to the messy look and ramshackle design of our robot, i think that if we had planned more in the beginnning then we could have mad our robot much more efficient and neater in it's design.

I do think our group was successful in the teamwork aspect of this project. This is because everyone got a chance to voice their ideas and everyone got some of their idea's implemented in the final robot design. I also think building something like this is much easier to do in a team because you get so many different ideas then if you were just working on it by yourself.

I think we were successful in this project because it completed all the specified goals of the project including, sorting fifteen marbles in under two minutes, being able to differentiate between marbles of different colors and materials, and being completely autonomous.