What is benchmarking you might ask? Benchmarking is where our team evaluates current designs, products, and ideas in order to begin brainstorming. It is always essential to evaluate a starting point in any designing and inspiration can be obtained from a variety of places. Current humanoid robots have been developed for a variety of purposes such as assisting with natural disasters, sharing information, assistance with research, and to study human behavior. Below are figures and descriptions for our preliminary research!

A quality function deployment, or QFD for short, is a design tool that cross evaluates criteria from a customer vs scientific engineering criteria. While designing is limited only by the imagination, feasibility and purpose must always be considered when brainstorming. Our team consulted with our client, Dean Wang, to gather a list of customer requirements and then created rough estimations of engineering values. These criteria are sorted into a table with weights and then ranked.

Budgeting, is an essential part of any design planning. Although it would be ideal to be as rich as Tony Stark and develop with the finest resources available, engineers often must design with a financial plan in order for their design to be marketable and competitive. Our capstone team was fortunate to have a very flexible budget, courtesy of Dean Wang and the CEIAS department. Even with a flexible budget our team still planned accordingly and detailed expected finances.