10/28 Meeting Minutes

Although the team has made great progress on the missions, they have not all been giving best effort on the project. Starting this week, anyone that doesn't give best effort on the project segment of the meeting will do a second session on the project and not work on the robot missions. The coaches repeated the points breakdown to remind the team that the project is worth the same amount as the robot performance during tournament judging. The team is very interested in going to the State tournament and want to do well on all aspects. We don't expect that many members of the team will have to lose their mission time.


OK, that being said, this was an exciting meeting. Mrs. Naughton contacted Allan Poole at Naperville Utilities and he has graciously agreed to assist the team with their energy project. He will come to our Thursday, 11/1 meeting to talk to the team. We again had 1/2 time on project and 1/2 time on missions. The project effort focused on preparing questions for Mr. Poole.


As a result of last meeting, the mission goal this week was to re-design the robot. Michael and Andrew brought in a new working robot and Joey brought in an innovative "stroller steering" robot design concept. First, the team generated a list of requirements on the white board. We then spent quite a long time discussing the best way to come up with a new design. Possible ways were 1) elect 2 or 3 boys to do it, 2) draw straws, 3) break into teams 4) build test robots. At the very end, Danny articulated the following: "we should combine the best of the robots we have into one robot, leaving out the parts of each that don't work". That lead to picking 3) and using his statement as a guideline.


During each team's mission time, they first used a voting method to prioritize the requirements. Then, they critiqued each of our 4 robots (tri-bot1, tri-bot2, Joey-bot & Toennies-bot), by thinking about what was most important, and came up with a composite design. Below is a shot of the white board with the requirements. The two teams were Black (Michael, Andrew, Patrick and Paul) and Red (Joey, Sam, Alex & Danny). The circled numbers indicate the priority of the requirements for each time. The hash marks were used as each team member picked what they considered most important (voting for each requirement only once). Also shown below are the Joey-bot (RCX) and Toennies-bot (NXT). The consensus for the teams is as follows:


Black Team: Liked Toennies-bot. Paul: need to move the NXT up vertically to make room for programmable battery. All: move NXT forward and make 1" shorter to be no longer than tri-bots. Needs a light sensor. Some questions about the casters.


Red Team: Also liked Toennies-bot. Joey is anti-caster due to their tendency to steer the robot when changing directions. Mr. Emge challenged them to come up with a better caster design. Alex suggested improving implement attachment. Alex, Sam and Danny didn't like the caster design either.


General re-design: use the Toennies-bot. It has good weight distribution but needs to be shorter and the caster design needs some work. In tests it seems to have good traction. The arm motor leaves good access to the buttons and screen. Michael and Andrew will address some of these issues and bring the bot back for next week. The team wants to move to the final design as soon as possible since it impacts their programs.

Requirements Joey-bot Toennies-bot












Great work by all this week.