International Design Project - LEGO

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Purpose:

The mechanical engineering department at the University of Idaho has formed a collaborative partnership with Ecole Nationale D'Aerotechnique in Quebec in order to explore issues and methods in international concurrent design. The long-term goal is to conduct design projects as a part of an international design team in which students collaborate to create new design solutions to a shared problem. The short-term goal this semester is to conduct a design project that is smaller in scope in order to establish relationships between these international institutions that will continue for multiple iterations of the project, establish the modes of communication between collaborators, and work with CATIA to model a common, reverse engineered product.

 

Fall 2009 Project Description and Requirements

This project involves the dissection, modeling, and virtual assembly of a common product that will be purchased and studied at each institution. The decomposition of the product and subassembly modeling assignments will be determined by the group. The specific assembly is LEGO Snow Groomer #8263, a 590-piece assembly project visible below.

 

Technical Abstract

Global design, manufacturing, and assembly of engineering products has become more and more commonplace in the last decade.  Part owners and assemblers are often thousands of miles and multiple time zones apart, yet they need to coordinate design changes and resolution of manufacturing problems as if they were under the same roof.  In an effort to simulate global engineering in an introductory CATIA course, 15 students from from University of Idaho in Moscow, Idaho and Ecole Nationale d'Aérotechnique in Montreal, Quebec organized themselves into four part owners/manufacturers and four sub-assembly managers/system integration houses with the mission of creating a 590 piece LEGO model of a snowcat/groomer.  Part owners were responsible for making changes throughout the product lifecycle (i.e. until the main assembly and final documentation was complete).  Sub-assembly managers were responsible for communicating errors in part design and resolving all issues in sub-assembly realization.  Relational part design was implemented to the greatest extent possible using design tables/formula features.  Part histories were linked with solid models by employing the part model comment feature.  Public problem reporting, status updates, and reworked part storage via the 3DS Campus website was used to track change orders and deliver reworked components.  In addition to fully functional, rendered sub-assemblies, design teams generated detailed assembly instructions that were illustrated with interactive 3D models.  This poster/presentation describes project management protocols devised by the student teams, summarizes lessons learned about concurrent engineering, and provides a framework for teaching initial stages of product lifecycle management in an introductory CATIA course.

 

Project Objectives

- Implement relational part design (maximize use of CATIA's Design Table/Formula features)

- Log all part revisions (date, author, description) using CATIA's part model comment feature that is visible in Properties (teams provide a set of documents summarizing part histories at the end of the project)

- Decide on and implement a rational part naming system and file storage structure; this is the most important aspect of the project.

- Time permitting, produce an improved set of LEGO assembly instructions using 3D models with Adobe Acrobat Pro.  Example is available at http://www.webs1.uidaho.edu/mindworks/CATIA/Past%20Projects/3DXML/User%20Manual%203D%20Final.pdf 

Operational Plan

- Form four sub-teams between UI and ENA (1 at UI and 3 at ENA)

- All sub-teams gain experience as 'part owners' responsible for making changes throughout product lifecycle (i.e. until main assembly & final documentation is complete)

- All sub-teams gain experience as 'sub-assembly managers' responsible for communicating errors in part design and resolving all issues in sub-assembly realization

- a lead engineer from each sub-team is responsible for main assembly realization and production of acceptable documentation (regular meeting format with UI & ENA instructors who will serve as clients).  Minutes will be kept of these meetings.

Communication
- A 3DS Campus profile has been set up for this project at campus.3ds.com/students/project-showroom/go/project/international-design-project-lego/

- Skype (http://www.skype.com/) can also be used for regular communication and status updates.

Motivation:

This project is in its second iteration for the University of Idaho. For this round, we are looking to create a lasting connection with the other participating university (Ecole Nationale D'Aerotechnique) and enable collaborative efforts in the future to better introduce students to the realities of the international scope of industry work.

PLM software:

CATIA

Website:

http://www.webs1.uidaho.edu/mindworks/catia.htm