Over the last few weeks, we’ve been taking what we developed from the brainstorming phase and creating concepts for our project. We used a virtual whiteboard to draw our concepts and had a lot of fun coming up with creative and innovative solutions. An interesting part of this experience was that a lot of team members built off of others’ ideas to create a new solution. Even though we come from different backgrounds and disciplines, we were able to work together on cohesive ideas.  

Since our project has such a large scope, we had to categorize the system’s core functionalities into 3 main groups: Docking and Charging, Proximity Detection, Data Transfer, & the User Interface, and Structure and Door Type for concept selection. Grouping features like this made concept selection a lot more organized since our brainstorming session had so many ideas. After we generated concepts, we created criteria for each group to quantitively judge each concept. The top concepts were reported in the Preliminary Design Report and will be heavily researched and tested over the next few weeks.  

This week we also had a peer review for our Preliminary Design Report presentation in front of the class. We did pretty well and got good feedback from other students and faculty. Most of our feedback was about the slides and how we describe the project so for the official PDR presentation next week with FPL, we’ll make these changes.  

Moving forward, we’re going to start CAD for the three functionality groups based off of our conversations with FPL at the upcoming PDR meeting. With a 3D representation of our concepts, we’re hoping to gain a better understanding of their feasibility. Additionally, we’ll begin researching components to start designing the electrical architecture of the intelligent housing structure. Lastly, with the guidance of FPL, we will begin designing wireframes for the control UI now that the quadruped is on its way. 

Although the first half of the semester has been heavily documentation-oriented, we are excited to start bringing our ideas to reality.  

Last week, FPL showed us a really cool demo of their current substation rover program. One of our collaborators drove around the rover at the substation from his home and showed us the live camera feed. Additionally, the operator was able to show us main features of the charging setup and housing structure for this rover.

This experience was extremely useful for us because we got to learn more about what FPL is looking for in the UI (user interface) and autonomous functionality of the quadruped and housing structure. They discussed their discontent with the current UI and how it needs to be immediately intuitive to someone unfamiliar with the project. We learned a lot from this meeting and will use it as reference when we begin our development. 

In the midst of a pandemic and online classes, Team Power Patrol, formerly known as Team 3, has been working hard at making our project with FPL a reality. In our first two weeks, we spent a lot of time getting to know each other and learning each other’s strengths so we have a solid sense of how everyone can contribute to the project. From these initial meetings, we shed a lot of the awkwardness of typical video calls as we found out we actually have a lot in common! Some of us have even met before from classes or design teams.

We also got to speak with the project liaisons at FPL who gave us a lot of the necessary information we needed to start thinking about potential features.

We’ve been mostly doing preliminary planning, such as determining our stakeholders and figuring out what features would be the most important to them. Next week, we will be beginning the brainstorming process and doing a lot of research to determine some of the key functionalities of the system. Based on this research, we’ll run this through our faculty mentor, Dr. Turner, and the team at FPL to get their feedback. We’re super excited to work on such a unique project and we can’t wait to show it to the world!