House of Quality
The House of Quality serves as data collection and attribute preference tool for the customer requirements and physical capacities of the project.
Inputs:
- Necessary customer requirements and magnitude of preference
- Engineering characteristics for AGV design
- Competitors AGV metrics data on customer requirements and engineering characteristics.
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Outputs:
- Rank of engineering characteristics
- Most important attributes the team should focus on in the design and development phase.
- Metrics for success against competitors.
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The team concluded that the working payload, the number of wheels, and the operation time of the AGV with out recharge were the most important aspects to the AGV design. The working payload would need to be under a specific weight as to not over extend the mechanical capacities of the motors driving the AGV but also fit within the capacities of the batteries operation time. The number of wheels and their arrangement allows for different degrees of freedom for AGV movement and is critical for providing sufficient stability to the AGV during travel and machine operating times.
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The following is the Define-Phase analysis performed by the senior design teams for the construction and implementation of an autonomous ground vehicle (AGV) for the DeXter. The latest project phase, design, facilitated the senior design team to contact its sponsors and stakeholders to record and measure customer requirements. Scaled weighing of project requirements guided the concept generation process, where a variety of tools, including a House of Quality, were implemented to establish initial designs. Project requirements found to be the most important to address were payload capacity for the platform able to support a DeXter component, the number of wheels incorporated in the design, and reducing the total amount of time for system operation. The phase ended with a presentation to Northrop Grumman and construction of initial prototype to verify budget projections.
Introduction
With manufacturing technologies quickly advancing, it is important for companies to grow and to stay on par with the market. The AGV's physical capacities will allow for a fully autonomous manufacturing environment where machines make decision for machines to manufacture parts with the goal of optimizing manufacturing lead times and decrees machine downtime. These Cyber Physical Systems allow for the development of new manufacturing methods and more diverse and flexible manufacturing environment.
DEFINE PHASE
September 15th - October 26th
The goals of the first phase are to identify the purpose of the project, process or service, to identify and then set realistic and measurable goals as seen from the perspectives of the organization and the stakeholder(s), to create the schedule and guidelines for the review and to identify and assess potential risks. A clear definition of the project is established during this step, and every strategy and goal must be aligned with the expectations of the company and the customers.
http://www.sixsigmadaily.com/what-is-dmadv/
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Project Schedule
This is a network flow diagram for the AGV project. Each box represents a task for project completion. The cells in each box (starting from top left) are start period (days), duration, end period, objective, late start, lag time, and late finish period. This corresponds to the Gantt Chart document document which can be found by clicking the link below.
Project Charter
The Project Charter provides a high level summary for the AGV project and serves as a tool to educate project sponsors on the necessity of the project coming to fruition. The AGV has the capacity to revolutionize the way we currently manufacture electrical and mechanical systems and adds a brings the machines and and materials together. This is what the team is going to achieve.
Expected Benefits and Business Case
The Threat Opportunity Matrix outlines the short term and long term effects what the sponsor may experience if there is (opportunity) or is not (threat) action taken on the development of the AGV.
Not working towards the advancement manufacturing in of the most quickly progressing markets can lead to a loss of business and quickly stagnate progress in manufacturing technologies. The completion and successful implementation of an AGV in a manufacturing environment will help make the push for cyber physical systems propelling sponsors into the next era of manufacturing technologies.
Define Phase Summary
Manufacturing high quantity and high variety products is not financially efficient given the current state of manufacturing practices. Creating an automated ground vehicle to enable movement for the DeXter could be used to solve this problem. During the define phase the scope was defined, customer requirements were ascertained, and those customer requirements were used to create a house of quality. The team determined that the payload, number of wheels, and operation time were the three most important AGV qualities required by the customers. These qualities were used to begin to design the AGV. The next steps are to finalize the design of the AGV, order the parts on the bill of materials, and create a simulation in Tecnomatics.
Fish Bone Diagram
This Fish Bone Diagram outlines a good majority of the issues associated with the current state of manufacturing which would be mitigated or eliminated entirely from an AGV mobilized manufacturing system.