Prioritization and scheduling was a very important part of the design process to our team and the approach that we’ve used has allowed us to succeed in making a functioning robot. 

An important decision that we’ve made was avoiding procrastination at the beginning when the concept of robot contest seemed to be distant in time. We started working at a good pace right away hoping that nothing would go wrong and if it would happen to be so, we’d have more time to master operating the robot and less workload for the last weeks of the quarter which are usually pretty intense anyways. From a more realistic perspective, if something would go wrong (as it always does), we’d have time to fix it. 

Our team has also agreed on spending some more time on concept generation in order to come up with a design we wouldn’t have to modify along the way and a simpler plan b in case the moonshot wouldn’t give the desired results. We were afraid that jumping to manufacturing straight away would generate more costs and that the changes made would be vulnerable to incompatibility issues with the rest of the mechanism if they’re executed in a hasty fashion. In reality, due to unforeseen challenges caused by friction we had to make these adjustments anyways.

Thanks to both of these decisions combined, when everything started failing and doubt or even despair came to our minds, we’ve had an alternative. Indeed in the beginning of week 9, due to unpredicted problems with our design and a number of other issues that we couldn’t fix easily, we decided to abandon our project and make use of our plan b. This turned out to be a good decision. Moreover, thanks to skills and experience acquired during the MAE 3 course we manufactured a new, fully functioning robot in a much shorter time, managing to meet the competition deadline.

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