ECE 491 - Senior Design ISE 491 - Senior Design ME 492 - Senior Mechanical Engineering Design Project Fall 2009

September 10, 2009

Fall 2009 Design Project Description:

For the Fall 2009 Senior Design experience, we will hold a robot competition loosely based on the Trinity College Fire-Fighting Robot Contest. Instead of extinguishing a flame, your robots will find and pick up a small ball (racquetball-size) and bring it back to the home position

We will follow most of the rules set forth by Trinity College for the fire-fighting robots. You will become familiar with the overall structure of the contest and all of the rules that apply to the Senior Division.

• General Rules and Procedures
• Fire-Fighting Robot Contest Rules and Procedures

The arena will be supplied. Please note that the dimensions of the Arena are only approximate while the robot size limits are not.

You will also notice in the rules that teams have the option to make their trials more difficult by selecting options that reduce their overall score. In our competition, each design group will have three attempts to find, pick up and deliver the ball to the home position using a combination of both mandatory and team-selected options.

Mandatory options:

• Trial 1: Furniture
• Trial 2: Furniture and uneven floors
• Trial 3: Furniture and variable doors

Team-selected options

• Arbitrary start
• Uneven floors (Trial 3) or Variable doors (Trial 2)

We will follow the detailed scoring procedures of the Trinity College Fire-Fighting Robot Contest

Competition:

On Friday April 17, 2009 a competition will be held for all of the design groups from 10:00 am - noon.

Discussion for the final written reports:

For your final written reports, in addition to your technical discussions, you are to discuss applications of the technologies that you are exploring and developing in this project. For your final report, discuss various applications of the technologies, with specific emphasis on:

• Engineering Standards - describe the process in which you searched for applicable professional engineering standards and applied them in your design.
• Safety - what sort of constraints must be accounted for if such technologies you employed were used on a large scale?
• Economic factors - How much would it cost to implement such technology and what sort of jobs would it impact (consider improvements to safety as well as displacing jobs)? What sort of impact would this have on the acceptance of such technologies?
• Reliability - if this technology was to be used in mass applications, what sort of reliability and failure rates would be acceptable?
• Aesthetics - what sort of additional devices or accessories could be used to make this technology as aesthetically attractive as possible while retaining its essential functionality?
• Potential customers - who would be the consumer for such technology? Consider the consumer of this technology; who would be the consumer? A government agency? Manufacturers? Insurance companies? The public at large?
• Societal impact - what would be the potential benefits to society for the applications that you discuss? What would be the potential drawbacks?