It's important for an Engineer Service Learning team to show their teacher, advisors, and especially their community partner what the team is doing for their project. Since these important figures aren't in the room all the time while the team is working, the team needs to show their progress and goals in another fashion. This comes up in the form of the Preliminary Design Review presentation. The team expresses their semester plan, goals they've set, obstacles encountered along the way, and goals that have been achieved. This is also important because the team gets feedback, questions, and direction for their plan from both advisors and the community partner.
The UAV team set a date and met with our community partner, Larry Burrow on October 13th 2015 along with Chris Butler and Dr. Chen. All the team members first introduced themselves and got acquainted with Larry Burrow. Eric Sosa, Ethan Albrigo, Thomas Thayer, and Duncan Klug gave a PowerPoint presentation and facilitated the discussion. Larry Burrow has a general idea of the project from past semesters, but it's important that the team shows him our take on the project and how we are doing things. For example, the team revealed to Larry Burrow our plans on using using IR filter over RGB and received feedback from him on the decision. Larry Burrow, Dr. Chen, and Chris Butler definitely gave valuable feedback with constructive criticisms, advice, and concerns. Larry Burrow gave advice to both the platform and imaging subteams about the gimbal system, camera case, and camera software. When it came to the gimbal system and camera case, he emphasized the importance of doing stress tests on the gimbal system and camera case. For the camera itself he referred to how we can also change the software of the camera to take multiple pictures at a faster rate. Dr. Chen also helped provide ways that the UAV team can test the case and gather data without using the actual UAV through practical means and through MESA labs. Chris Butler also provided important feedback regarding the timeline and how feasible it was to complete the project within the semester. To actually test if the UAV works like advertised, it needs to be used during the Spring semester when the grapes are growing again. This knowledge really helps the team know where to focus. Basically the team needs to channel our efforts into what we can feasibly finish and how important it is to pass a lot of knowledge to the Spring team.
The UAV team definitely gained positive feedback and commentary from our guests and gained clarity on how to meet our goals for this project.
And the UAV team would like to send a special thank you to Larry Burrow, Dr. Chen, Chris Butler for setting aside time for our presentation, Thank you!
