Meeting with the Director of R&D at Hoya

By Tanvi, Aarav, Anuhya, Jai, and Alex

Task: Meet with the Director of R&D at HOYA

Today, Iron Reign met with the Director of R&D at HOYA ITC, Abhi Patnaik. This meeting was focused on discussing the team’s portfolio and materials usage. We presented our work and participated in a Q&A style period to receive feedback, including on our own presentation styles.

Takeaways

Portfolio

Overall, we lacked proper presentation practice and this was very evident during the meeting. We were advised to put more effort into practice beyond only our individual lines. When presenting we were often redundant in some of our vocabulary (ex. Carbon Fiber) which took away from the presentation by creating a monotonous tone. We were advised to make our wording more diverse. Similarly, we were advised to be less redundant in our content as we brought up events such as Ri2D too much. For more readability, we were encouraged to make our portfolio less “wordy” and include more labels on diagrams, because judges don’t have time to read paragraphs on each of the slides. Each of the presenting members received personal presenting advice such as avoiding the statement “if we had more time”, focusing on positives more than negatives during questions, being consistent in explanations, and more!

Materials

Throughout this season we have struggled with various material components of our robot, and implementing feedback we received was very helpful. We were advised to create a materials database for new members and consistently do stress analyses to reduce strain on our materials. Regarding our concern about string strength, we were encouraged to check string materials for reliability before using them, because we have such high quality materials everywhere else on our robot. We also discussed friction caused by carbon fiber and how to ensure our 3D printed parts also had less friction, possibly by changing the direction of the print on the topmost layer to align with the movement.