The course Engineering Design was a multi-disciplinary course, where students from different studies were paired together.
The assignment was to create a search-and-rescue device. The device had to be able to move through a disaster area as quick as possible, avoiding as much obstacles as possible, in order to save as much casualties as possible. Casualties should, of course, be handled with care like real human beings, instead of being further harmed in the process of saving them. Taking this into account, we created an original design. We created a quadcopter with a Mantis Claw to save the casualties. The quadcopter could fly over the disaster area to get to the casualties, it then saves the injured people with the Mantis Claw. The Mantis Claw picks the casualties up very gently, it does not perform pressure on the people. We decided to 3D-print the Mantis Claw ourselves to avoid the risk of waiting for the parts to be ready. The quadcopter was eventually fully functional, however, it could not yet hover in the air as the function for stabilizing the quadcopter had not been tweaked enough (PID values were incorrect). Getting these values right takes a lot of work, and consequently, a lot of time, which we did not have. If we had a week extra, we would have been able to fix the small mistakes and the quadcopter would fly stable and be able to save the casualties.
With this project I was in charge of two aspects; coming up with creative ideas and building/programming the final device. This project taught me to work together with people I would normally not work with during my study. It was a nice project with a lot of freedom. The project also taught me and my group to cope with setbacks and how to come up with a plan B. The project also sparked a personal interest in building and flying racing quadcopters.