This week marks a significant milestone for us, as it was our first visit to the Northrop Grumman site. It was an exciting opportunity not only to present our project but also to engage with industry professionals and tour their impressive facilities. Our day started early, with a 4 am wake-up call to ensure we arrived at the visitor center by 8:30 am for an informal breakfast before the tours. During breakfast we found out that most of our team had around 3-4 hours of sleep! We toured several lab spaces, spoke to many different engineers, and gained valuable insights into their operations.

After lunch, we delivered our presentation to an audience consisting of our coach, our Northrop Grumman liaisons and a few other engineers. The audience was pleased with our presentation, and we got valuable feedback that we will incorporate into future iterations of our ideas. This visit offered us a deeper understanding of the practical applications of our system. The most notable takeaway was being able to see some of the spaces our device will interact with and hear directly from the engineers that our system is hoping to help. With this new knowledge, we are excited to refine and improve our project moving forward.

This week our team reached a big project milestone and made strides in our teamwork and communication skills. We collaborated for many hours to draft a slide deck for our first presentation as the Gear Guardians: the Peer Review Project Design Report presentation. This presentation, ultimately, was a success. We were given very helpful constructive feedback that we plan to implement as we prepare for our trip to Northrop Grumman. The second half of the week was unfortunately similar to the previous week. Hurricane Milton made landfall in Florida, and UF classes were cancelled on Wednesday and Thursday. Though the news of the hurricane was an added stressor, our team remained focused and completed a productive week.

Northrop Grumman’s office was closed in anticipation of the hurricane, as well, so our meeting with the liaisons had to be pushed to early next week. Additionally, we are excited to travel to Melbourne next week to present our Project Design Report to the Northrop Grumman team and get a tour of their facilities.

This week, our team completed a lab training of the new IPPD lab space. We also attended a guest lecture by Dr. Elif Akçali, who introduced and guided us through the concept of a “Brain Walk Ideation” session. This technique helped our team tremendously, and we were able to come up with many new ideas for how our system would interact with the technologies we have been researching in the previous weeks. Our ideas centered around four main concepts: a handheld tracking device, a doorway-antenna system, an overhead ceiling mount, and a movable cart.

After receiving feedback from our liaisons, we refined the product architecture to include two of our two viable concepts: the handheld tracking device and the doorway-antenna system. We analyzed the interactions between the components of our proposed system and refined the product architecture through assignment 6.1. Next week, we will dive deeper into technology research and present our findings in class. We are also finalizing preparations for our on-site visit to Northrop Grumman.

This week we focused our efforts on fundamental project management techniques such as creating a road map and risk assessment plan. This will prove useful as we have many big events coming up soon: the first draft of our Preliminary Design Report due and a site visit to Northrop Grumman! We also welcomed a new team member this week, Connor Moore, a senior mechanical engineering major.

Additionally, our team worked on brainstorming and concept generation. We brainstormed ideas that revolved around three categories: location detection, alert systems, and user interface design. We met with Dr. Patrick and our Northrop Grumman sponsors to discuss our ideas and are now beginning the process of drafting our first design report.

This week, our team met with our company liaisons, Jessica and Mary Alice. We shared introductions and the excitement of working together to design an effective solution for the company. We narrowed in project specifications, clarified prototype expectations, and addressed some limitations to be cognizant of in our project.

We also presented our team logo and were met with helpful and constructive feedback. We would like to present the newest update of the Gear Guardians team logo, which can be found in the bottom right corner of our video call!

Our meeting with Dr. Patrick led to great discussion about the research process and our next steps. In the coming weeks, we look forward to researching technologies and brainstorming possible solutions, all while being sure to leverage previously existing devices and technology.

Hello all! 

We are Team 9, tentatively the Gear Guardians, and we are excited to be working with our sponsor Northrop Grumman and our faculty coach Dr. Erin Patrick.  

This week we conducted our first meeting with our coach. We introduced ourselves, discussed team logistics such as meeting times and communication preferences, and discussed our scope of work table. Additionally, we made a few drafts of our team name and logo design.  

Looking to next week, we have our first meeting with our liaisons on Thursday, where we plan to get clarifying information on our scope of work. We also plan to start brainstorming and researching for our design solution.