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Our ProjectIn our project, we were to find a problem in a world and try to engineer a solution. We found that factory farms, also known as CAFO's is a huge problem. We focussed on cow factory farms because it produces the most manure. CAFO's, or Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation, causes pollution, billions of cubic feet of manure annually. This is a health hazard to both people and cows. It also pollutes the air and waterways. The cows are held in such contained spaces that their waste just builds up in their cages.
Our solution is a small robot that will drive around the cages and collect the waste that is on the ground. It will then travel to a storage-like container, in the ground, and dump the excrement. The container is actually a chamber that produces manure the factory can sell. It entire product would only cost $250, but it would make you $500 a day. |
Concepts
Engineering Design Cycle:
- Identify Need
- Research Problem
- Develop Possible Solutions
- Select Most Promising Solution
- Construct Prototype
- Test and Evaluate Prototype
- Comunicate Design
- Redesign
- Repeat
Reflection
This project was very fun and was right up my alley. I love to engineer things that can help people's futures. There were some minor difficulties, during this project. One of them being the fact that we didn't know what type of problem we wanted to solve. We knew it was going to be along the lines of animals, but we didn't know what. We had to change our original problem due to the fact that there was no new possible way for us to engineer a solution. It would have to be all social engineering, which was not our goal. We finally got back on track, once we found a new problem. Another complication was that we had to change our design a couple times because we wanted to turn the feces into manure. The struggle with that though was the fact that it would have to heat the waste to an extreme amount that would usually burn the cows, if they touched the robot. We solved this solution by having the chamber away from the cows and lots of research. We did an amazing job of cooperating and working as a team. We were all able to put in ideas and do our fair share of the work.