Our Structure

 

Our team was structured via small groups dedicated to each sub division of the project (Book grabbing, Computer Vision, Navigation, Web App and Business).

 

The main divisions of work can be seen in the "Meet our team" section below. When challenges arose in certain groups, we re-evaluated the groups to allow more people to help in the more challenging areas. For example, when we encountered a lot of technical issues with installations and making the arm move smoothly, the arm team was expanded and a part of the arm team was set aside to focus on the gripper design, a separate goal that still needed to be achieved. This re-arrangement was successful and we now have a smoothly moving arm and efficient gripper design. We assigned Greig as our project manager, who has been responsible for monitoring all the subgroups' progress.

 

We have had at least one full group meeting per week. These meetings allowed us to discuss the progress of the subgroups, share suggestions on the tasks and make important decisions that require input from all team members. We also use the meetings to set goals for the upcoming weeks or demos. Minutes are taken during the meetings to inform absent team members of the discussions.

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Development Tools

 

We use several tools to stay organised and collaborate:

Slack
For group communication. Discussions were organised based on topic in different channels with relevant members.
     
Trello

For keeping track of tasks and knowing what each member of the team is up to.

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Google Calendar
For arranging meetings and keeping track of important dates. It was set up to send reminders to team members through Slack.
     

Google Drive
Used for sharing files and documents, as well as any backups.   
   
GitHub
For code sharing and version control. A different repository is set up for each subsystem and the members of the corresponding team are the collaborators.
    
Overleaf         
For collaborating on formal reports typeset in LaTeX.

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Skype/Google Hangouts

For online meetings, as we can no longer meet in person due to the recent lockdown.

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Wix

Used to make this website.

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Challenges

 

During this project, there were many occasions where we really tested our team's ability to be flexible. 

 

Firstly, when some areas turned out to be more challenging than expected, we had to re-arrange our sub groups and re-plan some of the goals for our demos. Despite this, we still found we were making good progress, and were indeed on track to finishing the project on time.

 

The strikes, like for most of the other groups, also created a challenge for us as we had to find a way to present the new features we had created, without the physical robot being present.

 

Of course, then there's the final, most critical obstacle we faced during this course: the global coronavirus pandemic and the University's move to online learning. Nevertheless, we found we were still able work strongly as a team, even though many of us are now located in completely different parts of the world.

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Replanning