Collaborative Robotics Design: Essential Team Dynamics for Engineering Success

1. Robotics: Integrated Systems Design • Today • How to work in a multidisciplinary team • Form teams • First Lab Assignment • Monday • MLK Day • Wednesday • DoF and other common concepts

2. What is a Team? • Two or more people who interact with each other, are interdependent, and define themselves and are defined by others as a team. • Otherwise you are a group ( or a party).

3. What else is a Team? • Two or more people who work together to achieve a common purpose • What will be your team’s common purpose in this class? • To perform the lab assignments • To design and implement a robot for the Urban Search & Rescue Project • To learn about each other areas from one another

4. Team Process • How are decisions made? • How are conflicts resolved? • Team Roles • CTO: Chief Technical Officers (Facilitator) • Keeps the team focused and productive • Scribe • Documents the activities and decisions of the team • Rat Hole Watcher • Makes sure the team doesn’t get too far off topic

5. Running an Effective Team Meeting • Meetings must have a detailed agenda • What topics are to be covered, what activities will be performed • Team Roles Assigned • CTO, Scribe, Rate Hole Watcher • Document the Meeting • What was discussed or accomplished • What are the “action items” and who is responsible for each one. • Provides a group memory • Reminds individuals the assignments they need to complete

6. Team Meeting Exercise • Get into your assigned teams • Introduce each other and trade contact information • Run a 10-minute team meeting • Assign roles, use the meeting minutes template • Here is the meeting agenda: • Individual team members list 5 characteristics of a good team member • Individual team members list 5 characteristics of a poor team member • As a team come to a consensus of a top 5 list for good characteristics and poor characteristics in order of priority.

7. Review Lists My list of top 5 “Do Be’s” • Completes assignments on time • Communicates • Uses constructive criticism rather than destructive criticism. • Is on time for meetings • Sense of humor

8. Puzzle Game Form Teams Solve the given jigsaw puzzle without looking at the picture

9. What did we observe? • It is difficult to solve the puzzle without having a clear picture of what the objective is • Team members automatically assumed certain roles based on their personality types and styles

10. Brainstorming • Conceptual Blocks Impede your ability to generate alternatives and make you fixated on certain ideas. Stereotyping Generalizing Making unwarranted assumptions

11. Types of Mental Blocks • Perceptual • Emotional • Cultural • Environmental • Intellectual • Expressive

12. To Think Creatively, use other people’s view Creative Thinking Methods • Vertical Thinking • Lateral Thinking • Futuring

13. Example • An Electric Plant in Great Lakes area is having problems with zebra mussels. The mussels are forming a thick layer inside the cooling intake and reducing flow rate resulting serious problems in the plant. Since they are not a native species to the area there are no natural predators. How can we reduce the impact of the mussels? Also, how to economically dispose them once removed?

14. Team Assignment • Build a Rube Goldberg Machine using your Lego Kits • http://www.cs.siue.edu/robotics/integratedsystems/