Design Philosophy
One of the first major decisions that our group made was settling a couple of very high level design philosophy points.
First and foremost, we all agreed that the best designs were often the simplest ones. We wanted to be careful about not overthinking the solutions to our various subsystems. We know that this task can be accomplished with fairly simple solutions. Simple solutions are easier to design, more robust, and are much less likely to break or fail.
Secondly, we agreed that we wanted to make fundamental performance a main objective. Rather than try to throw in any super sophisticated strategies or gimmicks, we want to focus on basic performance. We want our robot to be able to do what it does exactly the same way in a very repeatable and consistent way.
Finally, we want to make our robot as robust and professional. ME210 Robots have a reputation of being janky, thrown together with bad connections and a shoddy shell. We want to try to buck this trend as much as possible. We want to build a robot that has fully soldered connections, a strong shell, enough mass to make control easier, and so on. This will help drive several of our design decisions.
First and foremost, we all agreed that the best designs were often the simplest ones. We wanted to be careful about not overthinking the solutions to our various subsystems. We know that this task can be accomplished with fairly simple solutions. Simple solutions are easier to design, more robust, and are much less likely to break or fail.
Secondly, we agreed that we wanted to make fundamental performance a main objective. Rather than try to throw in any super sophisticated strategies or gimmicks, we want to focus on basic performance. We want our robot to be able to do what it does exactly the same way in a very repeatable and consistent way.
Finally, we want to make our robot as robust and professional. ME210 Robots have a reputation of being janky, thrown together with bad connections and a shoddy shell. We want to try to buck this trend as much as possible. We want to build a robot that has fully soldered connections, a strong shell, enough mass to make control easier, and so on. This will help drive several of our design decisions.