Assignment: A surgical supplier needs a robotic arm to move the equipment within a sterile environment. Your team must design a remotely operated arm with at least three degrees of freedom using a base that pivots, an arm that raises and lowers, and a pinch mechanism.

What I Learned:  The challenges of building and coding our final project definitely was great learning experience for not only me, but my group as a whole. While the build of our final project also presented its own predicaments, coding the machine essentially taught us to code at the highest level. For instance, one big flaw with our code that we ended up fixing was the ordering. Our code was originally ordered with the smallest percent range at the top. This meant that whenever the brain read the code, it would immediately trigger the first if loop and get stuck in that loop. This caused the base to constantly be rotating and that majorly discouraged us, leading to us trying to find different methods to code the robot. In the end, we determined that the issue was simply in the ordering of the if statements. Once we reordered them with the largest percent range at the top, the code started to work properly. This experience overall taught us how to effectively and quickly react to adversity, which is a very salient skill in the engineering world.

Improvements/Corrections: Overall, reflecting on our journey throughout our project, we definitely endured substantial amounts of adversity, considering all the mishaps in our experience in building and coding the final product. In regard to building, the first design that we adhered to sported various faults, from instability and lack of functionality, which forced us to restart our overall build from scratch. The main problem in our initial design is that it had a very weak base, while we built the arm on only one side of the base, naturally causing the entire system to tilt on one side. In order to solve this issue, we devised a different idea entirely as a team. Instead of utilizing the ‘conventional’ arm design, we originally thought of merging a spindle system with the arm, while integrating two sprockets. However, since the new stable base and the functional sprocket system were completely compatible with the regular robotic arm, we decided to abandon the spindle system and incorporate certain technical aspects from our previous design into our new design, helping us complete our design successfully. Though, the completion of our design marked the beginning of another aggravating challenge, coding. As a team, we found the coding to be so complex to the extent that we couldn’t even finish it by the right ‘due date’. However, later we figured out that the main issue within our code was mainly that it was configured in the wrong and that some of the commands were coded incorrectly, enabling us to finish our final solution successfully.