Adam Muzzarelli and Jacob Richards

STEM 2nd Period

1/23/2020

Capstone Project Design Step 3: Evaluation of Alternative Designs

Identifying Evaluation Criteria

To start step 3, our group brainstormed possible criteria that would be most
important for our SAR drone to meet. We eventually shortened these criteria down to
the following: weight, price, power drain, availability, and flightime. We think the
aforementioned criteria are the most vital to test because of their potential impact on the
SAR drone.
Weight impacts not only flightime, but more importantly how large of a payload
the drone can carry. If the drone itself weighs too much, there is no longer room to carry
a med care package on board.
Price is key in marketing our product. If the price is too high, we eliminate
potential buyers. For this reason, we believe minimizing costs to be an important
criterion of our design concepts.
Power drain is one of the most important factors. The drone’s power usage
determines its flight time, flight range, battery size, processing power, etc. The less
battery usage of any one subsystem there is, the more power is available to other
systems.
We also believe availability is key to determining the best design. If a potential
design uses materials we cannot access, then it is a wasted design. This forces us to fit
our designs into the constraints of what resources we can use and implement.
Flight time is another of our most important criteria. It determines how long our
drone can actually be used. The longer the flight time, the longer rescue squads can
quickly search for potential survivors.

Weighting Evaluation Criteria

Weighting each criterion helps determine a level of importance for each testable
aspect of our drone. After careful discussion, we arrived at the weights listed below.
Decision Matrix Setup

Once the weights have been determined, we can apply them to each design
concept. For every concept, we rate how well it performs each criterion on a scale from
0-10, where 0 is totally useless and 10 is perfect. We then multiply these values by the
weighting of that criterion, and sum all the ratings together. Below is our filled out matrix.

Interpreting the Decision Matrix

Since concepts 3 and 5 scored quite closely, we believe there to be no clear

winner based on our matrix. However, cleary design concept 1 scored much lower than
concepts 2 and 3. This suggests we should focus our prototypes to contain sub
functions similar to concepts 2 and 3, and avoid some aspects of concept 1. Mainly, we
should focus on electromagnetic motor and propeller propulsion and drone-like layouts,
and avoid plane-like designs.
Surprisingly, our prefered design concept did not score the highest on the
decision matrix. This result has made us rethink some of the design choices we were
planning on implementing, such as multiple camera systems and an extensive
communications setup.