Design Mini-Project: Human Transporter

GEORGIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering ME 2110 – Creative Decisions and Design Spring 2009

Design Mini-Project: Human Transporter With ever-increasing fuel costs and laziness, there is an emerging market for personal human transporters. Perhaps the most widely-known such product is the Segway, shown in Figure 1. Unfortunately, the Segway is mechanically unstable – it falls over without active feedback control. This property makes the device dangerous – especially for those riders who do not have good jumping, landing, and falling skills. Your assignment is to improve the Segway Human Transporter. Your design should address several objectives: 1. Safety 2. Cost 3. Compatibility with society (Sidewalk courtesy, etc.) 4. Legal requirements (Motor vehicle laws, lawsuits, etc.) 5. Robustness to the elements (rain, wind, etc.) 6. Robustness to varying terrain 7. Load carrying capacity 8. Compact storage size Figure 1: Segway Human Transporter. 9. Ease of use 10. Any other qualities that you and your potential customers feel are important During the early part of your design process, you should strive to thoroughly understand the customer needs. You should also thoroughly investigate related products. You can incorporate the best features from them into your design. Members of the design team must create their own individual House of Quality for Homework #1. Furthermore, each team member will also create a specification list for Homework #2. Those related individual assignments can be incorporated into the final team report by combining the best features of the team members’ analysis into the team analysis.

1) Deliverables due at the beginning of studio next week i) A presentation on problem understanding. (In PowerPoint, limited to 5 min.) Clearly describe the design problem, as your team understands it. Present a House of Quality and explain how it has aided your understanding. Present a function tree for the design problem. Explain the current weaknesses of the Segway and present alternative products currently on the market. List any applicable patents that may limit or influence your design project. (Any pictures/videos that you obtain from the internet must have their source clearly indicated.) Summarize your work by stating the most important design objectives. Do not present any preliminary design ideas. ii) A written document containing: a) A list of all the alternative products that your team located. Give the product name, company, price, and cite your source of product information. b) A list of relevant patents. Give the patent number and name. c) A list of relevant lawsuits. Give whatever descriptive information you can.

2) Deliverables due at the beginning of studio in two weeks A presentation on five preliminary design ideas. (In PowerPoint, limited to 7 min.) Show an updated function tree. List your specifications. Show a morph chart and point out the most promising design ideas. Then, clearly describe the functionality of your preliminary designs. The designs should be distinct from each other. A change in color or size is not sufficient to qualify as a distinct alternative design. Present a structured evaluation of your alternative designs.

3) Deliverables due at the beginning of studio in three weeks i) A presentation on your final design (In PowerPoint: 5 min.) ii) A report containing the following: 1. An Abstract 2. An Introduction defining your customer’s needs and the overall product function. 3. A Design Overview, giving a detailed description of your design including quality sketches (preferably computer-generated) that show its parts and how it operates. 4. A Discussion that presents: − Four alternative design solution ideas. (That means 5 total designs). − Written explanation of why you chose your design from among the five considered designs. Use a structured evaluation process. − Explanation of the advantages and disadvantages of your chosen design. − House of Quality − Function Tree − Specification List 5. Conclusion The report should include a maximum of four pages of writing, plus as many figures and tables as necessary. A sample layout of the report is given on the following page.

ME 2110 Suggested Report Format for the Studio Mini-project

As you prepare your report, you should first review the book’s guidelines for using drawings and for preparing reports. For the mini project, you are asked to develop and evaluate design alternatives; consequently your Discussion section should present your design alternatives, and it should present your method of evaluating alternatives to select the preferred design. Title Page Abstract Introduction Description of task requirements and challenges Design Overview Presentation of your preferred design. Discussion Presentation of alternatives and evaluation methods. Conclusion

Please submit 2 copies of this report

References You need to document your information sources, including information about alternative products, relevant patents, and relevant lawsuits. Here’s how. Go to the IEEE Style Guide at this web address: http://standards.ieee.org/guides/style/section7.html#992 Style guides govern the preparation and appearance of documents; most professional organizations have style guides of their own, or they ask people to use well-known guides such as IEEE, MLA, APA, Chicago Manual of Style, and the like. In coursework at GT, we use the IEEE Style Guide as a default because it is easy to use, it is widely used, and it is easy for students to obtain. To prepare reference entries, use the models provided in Section 19 of this large style guide. These are your templates. Match your information to the templates according to these guidelines: − When you document an alternative product, you should use Section 19.5.2 (corporate reports) or Section 19.5.4 (miscellaneous unpublished works); − When you document a patent, you should use Section 19.5.4 (government documents); − When you document a relevant lawsuit, you will likely obtain your information from a newspaper or magazine. Treat these as periodicals, and use the guidelines in Section 19.3. − Videos that are obtained from the web should be treated as forms of regular publications. If your video or image was obtained from a company or university web page, then prepare a reference entry for a corporate report. If your video is attached to a published paper, then you should treat it as a publication in a periodical. − If your source is not on this list, consult the Chicago Manual of Style, as it is the most comprehensive guide to manuscript preparation that is easily available.