Noribo

2.009!  Senior Product Design Capstone!  Woah!

Okay, that should convey the standard excitement levels for 2.009 here at MIT.  Big course, big ideas, big teams, and a very unique experience.  The premise is to get a team of 20 MIT students together, give them $6500, and see what they can design and engineer over the course of a term.  Results are always interesting, and the end is a culminating presentation that had over 1000 people present in MIT’s largest auditorium to review and critique your project.  Beavitvl.

The theme of the year was “food”, very open and with endless possibilities.  Our team went with building a novel way to deliver food in restaurants, in this case a small swarm of robotic plates that would ferry food from the kitchen to you.  They had several interactive features, most importantly a dance they would do when a plate was removed from them.  The idea actually started as a robotic coaster for delivering beer in bars, seen as a way to alleviate the pain of waiting for a bartender in a packed bar.  With time the idea muted to all-purpose food ferrying, so it goes.

Our robot in an exploded view.

The bot was a fun design project.  I was in charge of bringing all the disparate parts together into a final package, and given that a low profile and small form factor was key to success there were many challenges in packaging everything so tightly.  Not to mention all the design for manufacture we had to include in our build.  Still, at the end of the day I brought a lot of innovations to the table when parts didn’t fit and made sure all the layout worked well.  Beyond that, when a problem arose, it was often at the intersection of two or three team’s parts, and I found myself being the liaison between designs more often than not.

Our finalized bot, looking something like a UFO

A depiction of our bots in action

The bottom of our robot

Our bot with a very adorable sushi plate on top

Our bots went through quite a few design revisions, mind you.  There were basically three stages.  During the mock-up, we threw together a bot in an inordinately short amount of time, having a radio-controlled bot with the basic form factor done in some 5 hours one Saturday.  Surely a testament to the rapid prototyping skills of a modern caffeine-injected MIT student with a nice machine shop at hand.

The first bot had an acrylic shell that we laser cut and assembled with Charles Guan’s infamous “T-Nuts”.  Powered by an Arduino and a random smattering of battle bots components, it served bravely, but was dismantled to make the second iteration.  This guy featured a 3dp chassis with an acrylic top plate that was etched to produce interesting different designs.  It also featured LEDs for different underglow colors, which the judges loved.  Guidance was provided via wall-following with IR sensors, the idea being that it could follow a small lip placed around a bar.

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A really fun project, a lot of good memories, and a experience I wouldn’t pass up.  Thanks Prof. Wallace!

-Cd