The team made a pivotal transition this week from our high-level research into narrowing the scope and moving towards a specific direction of our design. Following our visit to the Johnson & Johnson site last week, we started to make the transition to concrete deliverables in a multitude of different project avenues.

We updated the Project Plan document to include our final project scope and implementation details so that the documentation would be on par with our enhanced understanding of the catheter assembly process and short-term design goals.

One of the major technical developments this week was fabricating a first iteration of a fixture to cook the loop tip. As discussed in last week’s blog, the creation of this fixture prototype will be pivotal to successfully automating the most manual and fragile portion of the catheter manufacture. We also continued to perform our process flowcharting of the wire insertion and assembly. In particular, we filled out the flowchart with all the required process steps, specifically denoting the steps that we anticipate are more amenable to automation. We have already found this to be useful in directing the development of the loop tip cooking fixture and allocation of subsystem responsibilities.

We also started to make headway on the software and sensing areas of our project, as we developed a preliminary computer vision proof of concept (PoC) to test component detection capabilities. We ran a few early sample tests on images, which were successful and will guide our implementation of vision tools for part orientation and verification later this semester.

Lastly, we researched a new method of nitinol wire insertion and orientation verification, which will provide a basis for the team to assess an alternative process’ capability for improved precision and repeatability. We will incorporate these learnings into testing and validation efforts as well.

All in all, it was a very productive and technically dense week for the team. We were able to make the transition from our initial brainstorming/planning phase and into prototype development and analysis, which sets the stage for next week’s work as well.