Post #4

Team Roles

Our team members are James Froelich, Siyin (Francesca) Wang, Markus Schiffer and Sylvia Wang.

Markus is our team’s ROS guru and Perception guru, since he had a lot of experience with using ROS and robotics related research and projects. He can lead us to pick the appropriate ROS tools for building different components of our project.

James is experienced with hardware and 3D printing, and he is our team’s hardware guru as well as design and fabrication guru. He can lead us to identify and solve any hardware related issues. Furthermore, he is good at using a 3D printer to engineer any physical items needed for the stretch robot.

Francesca has connections with the accessibility team from Apple. She can get us in contact with our target user group and conduct interviews. She is our team’s user interface guru and user research lead. She can lead us to understand the user's needs and polish our solution that provides a great user experience.

Sylvia is our team’s manager and will be in charge of team coordination by organizing team meetings, taking notes, facilitating team discussion, and documenting our project progress. She can help ensure that everyone is on the same page and our project is on track.


Strategies

We created a Messenger group for communication, and we are using Notion as our workspace (Lending a Hand Workspace). We divided the workspace into different sections, such as a User Research section to keep track of all the interview notes and insights into the user's requirements, a Resources section to collect useful resources for our project, a Notes section to organize our meeting notes as well as documenting our project progress, etc. In this way, we can group everything related to our project in one place which is useful for recording what we have accomplished and monitoring our progress. Besides using the class time to work on our assignments and the project, we will have at least one weekly team meeting to sync with each other, discuss and create action items that are to be done for the week. Having a to-do list for the week helps us align with our goals so that everyone is aware of what we need to do together to stay on track of our project. Even though we have different team responsibilities, each of us can still take time to contribute in other areas. We will use these strategies for team coordination and adjust them as we see fit.