Sprint 1 Recap

Welcome! We are Lab 1015, and we now 2 weeks into our voice-controlled battle bots journey. Here’s an overview of what we’ve done so far:

Ideation

Before we were Lab 1015, we were just a group of engineering students who like eating dim sum. To figure out what we wanted to create together, we first came up with some overarching project goals:

  • Make use of technology in new and interesting ways
  • Create something with a “wow factor”
  • Do something with technical challenges
  • Make a product that people want to use and is aesthetic
After going through these goals, we came up with individual learning goals, and listed topics that we’d be passionate about working on. We invested a good amount of time into ideating, and finding something that everybody was excited about. Jordan wanted to work with weapons, Jamie suggested robot-robot interaction, Emma and Anya wanted to do voice recognition, and Alli wanted to make sure that we were conscious about the ethics of our project, and didn’t create something people would be too reliant on. We all wanted to make something that people would really want to use. Putting it all together, we came up with voice-controlled battle robots!

The Plan

This 8 week project is split into four 2-week sprints, and we have a sprint-review with our class at the end of each sprint. To keep track of tasks, we maintain a Trello Board with a list of “To-do”, “Doing”, “Done”, and “Admin” cards. We also hold daily scrum meetings on days that we don't have class.

Sprint 1 Outcomes

So far, we've established how we want to function as a team, created an integrated, independent, functional prototype, and completed some preliminary user research

Our first circuit!

Comprised of an arduino with a motor shield and batteries

Our CADed drivetrain

An aesthetic drivetrain for an aesthetic robot