Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Exit Interview


Content:


(1) What is your essential question and answers?  What is your best answer and why?
 EQ: How can an Electrical Engineer Best improve military use of robots?
answer 1: An Electrical Engineer can ensure software and hardware of surplus robotics.
answer 2: Designing precise sensors with advanced Targeting recognition.
answer 3: Electrical engineers should treat all completed robots as a sophisticated prototype
Best Answer:
Every robot design MUST go through a prototyping stage in order to have people invest into technologies. When prototyping, it’s essential to do multiples versions or iterations. You can never do too many because this process mitigates your risk when it’s time to commit more resources to your project.When you have a high-level prototype, it takes the guesswork out. You can hold it and see how it will look and feel. Not only can you use that prototype to get feedback from end users and investors, but you get more bang for your buck because a nice prototype can be used in promotional marketing materials.( Northrop X-47B, BAE Raven, EADS Barracuda)(US Navy News Release)
(2) What process did you take to arrive at this answer?
My answer came relatively smoothly and it came down to my mentorship. Ajay, my mentor, guided me from first working with binary, to working with FPGA, and last but not least prototyping. For the past two months Ive been working with the UAV team and throughout that time period we did a series of eight different flight tests to determine what was wrong with the UAV and how we could have fixed it. Even a few months before joining the UAV team I was on the UGV team and they were running tests on the avoidance and testing the lidar sensors.   Professor Bouschvich also helped develop a second frame the the UGV team to cut off 10 pounds in the weight which is very good.
(3) What problems did you face?  How did you resolve them?
Out of the whole year, my biggest problem was a tie between two conflicts. My first problem was losing my mentorship at Lockheed Martian due to the government shut down, and my second problem was trying to prove myself to the college students that I could do more than just the basics (seriously it was more of a competitive thing). When I lost my mentorship at Lockheed, I started to panic because I had no mentor and interview 2 was just around the corner. So in desperate need for a mentor, I went to Cal Poly Pomona to talk to the Dean of Engineering and she said they don't offer those opportunities to High School students, but as she said that, Ajay popped his head in the room and we started talking and I told him about my project and he liked the idea of everything so he introduced me to the NGC project and told me that I could stay in the project even after my project was over, and I plan on doing so. The other challenge was not really a problem, Honestly I don't have a problem with mentorship at all, its more of my personality. I strive to be better than others, but I always challenged the college students on tasks and Id always lose so I guess you could say it was a blow to my self confidence.
(4) What are the two most significant sources you used to answer your essential question and why?
aside from Mentorship: 

1. Behavioral demonstration of a somatosensory neuroprosthesis Berg JA,  Eng, 21(3):500–507 (2013)
In the very beginning of the Journal, Berg and his colleagues reference a lot to the prototyping stages and the development of ones project. what I got from this is,  robot is never really complete until is labeled decommissioned. Berg talks about how he learned from similar Behavioral studies to see what they did and he would perfect it , every robot regardless of its age and capabilities has its share of improvements weather it be a simple battery issue or a computing issue, there is always areas for improvement. Take prosthetic for example, at John Hopkins Lab in 2012, an engineering team no bigger than 40 members had developed a very successful version of a robotic prosthetic, but it wasn't perfect. After hundreds of tests they created another prototype of the first one to create a better prosthetic. Although the robotic prosthetic is still in testing, people are reporting that the arm works well with minimal defects.

2. J.G. Verly, R.L. Delanoy, and D.E. Dudgeon. "Machine Intelligence Technology for Automatic Target Recognition." MIT Lincoln Laboratory Technical Report, June-July 1999. Web. 25 Mar. 2014.

-For design research, prototypes serve as props to help yield more authentic feedback from end users. We know that the brain’s ability to comprehend a concept benefits from as many sensory inputs as possible. This is especially true when a concept is something novel or a departure from the norm. Putting a tangible prototype into the hands of an end user gives their brain something physical to engage with, in turn helping us get clearer insights as to the user’s preferences. This source was a major step forward, Verly, Delanoy, and Dudgeon all discuss the idea of how throughout the process of development, they accepted others criticism whether it was good or bad, and from there they would branch more ideas as to how to improve the target recognition. Even when it came to the post prototyping stage, they shared their ideas with other engineers so they could also base ideas off of what they had originally created, thus leaving more room for improvement and sparking new ideas among engineers.

Be prepared with evidence and specific examples to support any response.  It is also significant to cite sources as you explain.

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