Our original time line was a little over zealous. We wanted a finished mechanical system by week 4 of the term. This was way off... We spent a good 75 % of the term getting the mechanical system built and adding on the electrical system as the mechanical system was being built. We spent a lot of time working on a well tuned mechanical system for optimal performance, which paid off for the most part.
Looking back on our original time line, we say the robot build as being to divided into 3 sub-systems, where once one was built, we would move onto the next. This is not how it worked out, and we worked on the electrical and mechanical systems through week 8. Thankfully Jeremy had done a lot of software development and we hit the ground running week 9 getting the code functioning.
Thankfully, we did not have any major design changes. We stuck to our main design for the entire project and solved design issues as they came up.
Looking back on the term, the biggest lesson learned was how long it takes to build a system like this. Using commercial products when possible will definitely help because it usually simplifies the design. The electrical system was the easiest system to design because so many of the components just need to be wired up to work, and the supporting documentation for many of the components are very well done. In the future, more time will be allowed for each of the systems and more planning ahead would be ideal.