The ME 370 walker and automaton projects was a great learning experience. It taught a lot of things and showed me what it is like to be an engineer. The project started with ideation and selecting our target audience. We chose children who attend the University of Illinois’ engineering open house. We decided to make an automaton which resembles a cyclist. We were inspired by all terrain bike ridders and wanted to make an automaton which a lot of people find impressive. After ideation I proceeded to create a ideal 4 bar linkage which represents the leg mechanism and hand waving mechanism using SAM software. On further investigation of this software I learned that SAM can produce PVA and path plots. SAM really helped me improve my understanding of graphical linkage synthesis and 4 bar linkages. After finding the optimum 4 bar linkage, I CADed the leg mechanism using Creo Parametric and this helped me improve my CAD skills and I learnt how to laser cut and 3D print.

 I was responsible for using SAM and creating 3 different 4 bar linkages for the walker and automaton combined. Additionally, I designed the walker and chassis on Creo parametric and created the PVA plot on matlab. After performing my portion of the walker, I realized that my strengths include leadership, division of tasks according to people’s skillsets, CAD, simulations and completing tasks on time. However, I do feel that my weakness is my inability to share responsibility but this project has helped me improve and work on it. Apart from that, ME 370 improved my understanding of cams, linkages, gears and how dynamic systems come together. This knowledge and skills gained in this class is helpful and can be applied in real engineering jobs.

Personally, I feel that the projects were the highlight of the class, we encountered real engineering challenges and used knowledge from previous design classes and incorporated them while designing and prototyping the models. Even though there were many challenges faced in this project such as integrating both projects, the walker moving on two different terrains, understanding the power train gear mechanism, and how to distribute the power amongst the mechanism; our group overcame all these hardships and were successful in the building and performance of the mechanism. The suggestions we have to incoming students who are taking this class in the fall would be to get started CAD modelling early because there are going to be many iterations that the automaton and walker will have to go through in order to reach their full potential. Even though our walker won the competition with the fastest time of any other section, we still had troubles in designing and iterating the different aspects of the walker and had to improve it every day. Some general project planning and design process advice would be start early and make sure you have a good image in mind of what the theme and goal is in the group. One other suggestion is to not make the links in too close to each other because with spacers and joint heads there is a big chance of the links interfering, especially in the rotating four-bar linkage.