This industry-sponsored project was undertaken in teams of six working full-time for a whole semester in Spring 2020. The project required us to take a brief set by the sponsor company and work together to develop a detailed design that would fulfil those needs. Being a business project, we were also required to develop a business plan for how we would launch our solution to demonstrate its commercial viability.
Our brief was to design a welding jig that could assist with the fabrication of frames made from steel tubes, particularly rollcages, though a more general solution was desirable.
We started with two site visits, where we observed current procedures at our sponsor company and interviewed employees to gather information about the difficulties they had with the current system. We then set about brainstorming possible approaches and researching technologies that could be used, from which we developed the idea of an assistive, smart welding jig - that is, a jig that can guide the welding operative as to where to position components, and provide feedback on accuracy. The idea was that this would be considerably cheaper than a fully automated solution, thereby making better precision and quality control accessible to smaller businesses.
With the exception of the project manager, each of us then took on detailed design work for one of the subsystems: component positioning, component holding, electronics, software and user interface. I developed the software and wrote a prototype algorithm in Java for detecting and measuring tubes, which also meant working with my teammates on the electronics and user interface to make sure the design fitted together.
Thank you to Andrei Petrus, James Russ, Alberto Guerra Martinuzzi, Darshi Shah and Tom Clarke for kindly allowing me to publish our collective work here.
