Tag: EarthSense

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“Fail Early, Fail Often”

This is not the first time I heard someone say “it’s okay to fail.” I have always been told that as long as you learn something from the failure, it is okay to fail. But honestly, I would still rather not fail at all. I always thought that phrase was something that is easy to say but hard to put into action. In fact, I don’t like a failure so much that I would rather not try if I knew I was going to fail.

However, as I applied to be part of the course, I knew that I would need to have a different mindset if I were to be a part of it. When designing and creating something, you are bound to fail. I believe that if you don’t fail while creating, you most likely did not take enough risk. There is probably nothing innovative about it. Even with this understanding, I knew I would have difficult time coping with failure.

As if the professor knew this challenge that I was facing, learning from failure was one of the mindsets that we learned when the course began. However, it was the same thing that I heard before – how we should celebrate the lesson learned from the failure. But I wanted to hear more about it. I needed someone to convince me that you can eventually achieve success by learning through failure. This week, the professor invited Michael Hansen from EarthSense to do that exactly.

Michael Hansen from EarthSense talking about the importance of failure and learning from it

Michael shared about his journey through a startup business called EarthSense. The company creates a small autonomous vehicle that the farmers can use to collect data on the traits of the plants in the fields. Currently, they have a working model that can successfully collect the data for the farmers, but in order to create a working model, he had to go through many failures, especially during the design phase of the product. He would design a prototype, test it, learn about what is working and what is not, reiterate the design, and continue the process.

What I found interesting in his presentation is that in a way, he was telling us that there is a “correct time” to fail. This so-called correct time is when the product is in an early prototyping stage. The reason behind this is that the earlier you fail, the smaller the cost of failure is. Thus the reason he was telling us “Fail early, fail often.” I appreciate this mindset as he was saying that it is okay to fail early since the cost is low, but as you reiterate and continue the process, you should fail less and less. To me, that is more convincing than simply saying that it is okay to fail as long as you learn from it. Yes, indeed learning from failure is vital in creating a better design, but at some point, you should stop failing, right?

3D Printing for the First Time!

During the second part of the class, we had an opportunity to get into a team, come up with a name for the team, and design a logo to represent it. Just coming up with a name itself was already challenging for us. As soon as we gathered as a team, everyone, including myself, was claiming how bad they are at coming up with names. To solve this problem, we started throwing out what we were working with throughout the project in order to get inspiration: accessibility, affordability, wheelchair… and then one of the team members got it. ROTAM. It means wheel in Latin, which we thought was perfect since our goal is to improve the wheelchairs somehow. We even came up with a design immediately. We were going to have ROTAM with the O replaced with a wheel of a wheelchair. Unfortunately, due to the time constraint, we could not transfer that exact design into a 3D printed model.

Ultimaker 2 at work 3D printing the team logo
3D printed model of the team logo

It was very exciting for me to see that the 3D printing worked. The whole process felt more realistic now that I had an experience going through the designing, transferring the design into software design, and 3D printing the design to have a tangible model by the end. Although it will be way more challenging to do this for a wheelchair part that can actually be used, I am excited to see the potential that it holds.

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MOVIng Forward

Iterate, Iterate, Iterate

Our speaker this week was a designer from the agricultural technology start-up, EarthSense, based in Illinois’ Research Park. EarthSense has developed an autonomous, compact robot that assists farmers in collecting data from their crops on the ground level. Through their talk, we got a first-hand look into how 3D designing and printing is used by companies in the real world. EarthSense started by designing a proof-of-concept device and then tested it with a few early adopters. From user interviews and watching farmers interact with the device, they were able to pinpoint what features to improve on in their next iteration. The big thing I took away from their talk is how many iterations the designers go through in order to come up with the final product. Our speaker showed us a picture of what looked like almost a hundred discarded 3D prints of versions of a camera casing used on the robot. This part was complex because it had to only work in one specific direction so that users could not accidentally install the part upside down. Moving forward on our own project, I realize how important it will be to make many iterations of our design in order to ensure we have the best possible final copy.

Starting to Print

After the presentation from EarthSense, we got together with our teams to come up with a team name and designed a 3D printed logo. Our team decided to call ourselves MOVI to symbolize the enhanced movement we hope to give Jenna through the design of a less-bulky protective cover for her microprocessing knee. For our logo, we wanted a design that conveyed movement, but also seemed sturdy and protective. We decided to use shrinking letter sizes to give the appearance of movement and surrounded them with a triangle so that they looked protected,

Our team logo being 3D printed
The finished product

Working with Jenna

Later in the week, we got a chance to sit down with our mentor Jenna and discuss our ideas with her. Since I missed the first class session, this was my first time meeting Jenna in person and seeing her prosthetic limb. We started by getting a better understanding of our design problem. Jenna currently has a prosthetic leg cover (pictured below) that she uses to protect her microprocessing knee. The cover is sturdy, but it is too bulky on the back side of her leg and is heavy. This limits her range of motion with her leg. Our idea was to design a lighter weight protective pad that Jenna could wear to protect her leg, while still maintainig her range of motion. When we pitched this idea to Jenna she seemed very excited and we started to brainstorm potential ways to approach our design. All in all, it was a great meeting and I am excited for our team to begin workshopping solutions.

Jenna’s current prosthetic leg cover
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Progress Doesn’t Always Mean Walking Forward

LESSONS FROM THE FIELDS.

This week, we were back at the Maker Lab solidifying our inspirations and ideas. We were able to confront a collective fear together: failure. Many of us had expressed fear of failure, and while I had not done so publicly, it was a thought that has always been floating around in the back of mind too. We had the incredible opportunity to talk to an UIUC alumnus, Mike Hansen, from EarthSense, a startup dedicated to using autonomy, software, and innovation to revolution agriculture data collection. Mike came in prepared with stories of failure after failure to share with us, and he showed us how failures stacked up into successes and solutions. He showed us how failures can be unintentional successes with the way that the camera guard he made only allowed the camera to be installed a single way, which later became a needed feature when considering different assemblers of the TerraSentia he designed. It was one thing to be told to “try again and again until you succeed,” but hearing Mike’s actual experiences helped make it click for me. I realized that it really was okay – and actually expected! – to have failures in the process of innovation.

Mike Hansen telling us about failures and different innovation mindsets.

TINKERING AROUND.

After, Mike’s talk, we split off into our groups to discuss a team name, the direction our product will go in, and a team logo. My team, previously Team 1, had a very difficult time coming up with a name, and cycled through various varieties of OnTread, Solestetic, other obscure words, etc. Yet, eventually, taking inspiration from a previously vetoed name, we settled on the name Solestice. Solestice is a portmanteau of the words ‘sole,’ referring to the bottom of a shoe, and ‘solstice,’ an astronomical phenomenon that occurs twice a year. Our hope for this project is to create an attachable tread for prosthetics users to use when walking on ice and other similarly slippery terrain. Afterwards, we created a logo which resembles two triangles stacked upon each other, slightly misaligned and familiarized ourselves with the Tinkercad program through modeling said logo and 3D printing it on one of the machines present in the Maker Lab.

MOVING.

As we wrapped up our team name, we discussed a plan to meet with our mentor Jenna, a prosthetic user, once again to make sure that the direction we take our product in is user-centered and truly something prosthetic users can and want to use. We will definitely take the new mindsets we have learned throughout each class – that of user-centered design and not viewing failure as a taboo – and apply it to our own research and development process!