Designing winning robots by careful design of their development process

We present a comprehensive robot development process and its evaluation. We designed this process in the context of a robotics course in high schools. The motivation for designing this new process was improving the robustness and reliability of robots developed by students and preparing students for becoming better designers. The newly designed process proved to be highly successful in designing top quality robots. In the process design, we explored and adapted existing design tools and methods to the specific designers, the nature of the product, the environment, the product needs, and the design context goals. At the end of this thorough design, we selected a synergetic integration of six tools and methods to compose the new comprehensive development process for this product context: conceptual design, fault-tolerant design, atomic requirements, fuzzy logic for control, creative thinking, and microprogramming-based design. The design skills of the students that learned the design process and the performance of robots they designed and participated in an international robotics contest were examined. The high school teams that studied the proposed process won the first places in an international contest. The robots developed by the students had better performance than robots built by engineers and faculty teams. Professional experts rated the robots’ designs as excellent. The students that studied the process demonstrated high level of diverse design skills including creativity and design management capabilities. Additionally, they improved their science subject grades and their attitude toward engineering. Both the results obtained by the study and the authors’ experience in teaching robotics demonstrate that the proposed robot development process could be taught successfully in high school and that it leads to superior robotic products. Our experience also indicates that this process could serve industry design by improving the robustness of robots operating in uncertain environments and supporting fast change management practices.