REFLECTION

Thoughts on ME 370

This project was the most time consuming and challenging project of my college experience thus far. However, it also was the most rewarding. For the group project I was the official leader which was my first time individually leading (not including co-leading) an engineering group project. This was challenging because I was still learning concepts while I was trying to direct, lead, and teach other members of the group technical information. I am used to only needing social/behavioral tactics to solve group projects/problems and this needed that along with enough knowledge to explain technical information effectively to my group members. I really loved learning about the position-velocity-acceleration analysis (PVA) and the dynamic force analysis (DFA). It was especially amazing and rewarding to simulate the leg mechanisms on Matlab and be able to direct a computer to compute the analysis for you. Through learning those analysis I also improved my Matlab skills by a tenfold. I had already had previous experience with gears but little to no experience with linkage mechanisms. Degrees of freedom was a new concept to me and it was interesting to learn about it but also learn about it elsewhere in my ME340 lecture. It is always interesting to learn a concept through two different perspectives. The most challenging areas of this course were making the leg mechanism and creating the PVA code. It was difficult to get the lengths just right while making sure to accommodate  for leg width, and a useable path and not have clearance  issues between the different links. Paper to real life is a difficult transition. The PVA and DFA were difficult because I needed to understand PVA and DFA well and then also be able to take my knowledge and insert it into the Matlab template which was a coding program I was not overly proficient with when I began, using our individual leg design. Thus, I had to also learn a lot about Matlab to even understand the template code. I also learned a lot about how to work with difficult group members. This was a completely different challenge. As a leader, I had to assign people work, be supportive of the work I assigned them and also help where needed. I also had to be “the bad guy” and let people know when they were not pulling their weight. I believe though, despite those issues, that I was able to keep our group moral up even when we were one group member down. Because me and one other group member were doing the majority of the work, it was hard to make sure everything was time managed well. There were definitely times where I could’ve allocated time as a group leader better. For the most part though, I think I was a good group leader in terms of making sure that good quality work got done. The most rewarding part of this project and experience was seeing our walker/automaton cross the finish line during the big race day! It was incredible to see our hard work go from a piece of paper, to a cardboard rendition, to an actual walking mechanism and to also successfully reach our goal; walking past the finish line in competition. Overall, I believe that this project helped me grow as an engineer and I am very proud of my individual work and the team’s overall success.