During the first day of the course we began “speed-dating” to form a group for the project. This allowed us to talk to different people across different disciplines and ultimately pair up with students who had the same goal as us. The group consists of: 

• Azim Iqbal – Software engineering
• Bjørnar Borgersen – Software engineering
• Danial Rana- Software engineering

• Simen Hegge – Machine engineering
• Sondre Tverå – Electrical engineering
  

After assembling our group, we began to identify the requirements for this project and what was expected from us in terms of documentation and design. We then began a brainstorming session trying to choose a concept. 

Here are a few of the projects we scrapped the first day for various reasons:

• Autonomous cars
  • Car that finds and picks up objects
  • Car that follows people and avoids obstacles
  • Car that hands out antibac
• Autonomous chessboard
  • Robot arm that picks up a piece and moves it
  • Calculates most optimal move at any time
• Mechanical smartwatch

The mechanical smartwatch, as mentioned, would be controlled by voice recognition to display the time and date in different parts of the world. It also featured an alarm and other stopwatch functionalities. This idea was shut down as we together with our lecturer realised that the project would probably be too easy.

The idea we settled on was to make either a dealer, or player robot, with its own robotic arm. Everyone in the group as well as the lecturer agreed that this would be quite a challenging but still achievable project. With this starting point we could make a lot of different final products even though the base function remained the same. It also gave us creative freedom in terms of what we wanted to expand on, whether it be software related or mechanical.

An important part of our development process was choosing a methodology that would allow us to iterate continuously through the development process. For this purpose, we decided to implement Scrum as a working method, and use sprint as its core. Scrum will make sure that the team will reach the goals set every week. Each sprint will last for 1 week. We will create a rough outline of each sprint, until November.  We will be using Trello to hand out tasks and document all our work throughout the development, it’s a nice tool because it gives an overview of what each group member is working with and where in the development process a functionality is.

Below is a screenshot of how our Trello was after our first session.

As the course progresses our goal is to have at least one weekly meeting in person, and possibly more online due to the corona situation. During our working process we can communicate with each other at any time in Discord, where we have created a group that is available at any time both for calling and chatting. If we have any questions we can easily reach each other and get answers.