Högskolan i Skövde

The aim of this essay is to describe the development of two prototypes, a physical one and a computer one, for a ball game involving interaction with an industrial robot.The purpose of the game is to attract young people, especially young women, to engineering, for amusement or education, at exhibitions or other student environments.

This project in Product Design Engineering was initiated by the Centre for Intelligent Automation, a research group of Skövde University who offered the task in cooperation with two other areas of engineering, i.e Automation Engineering and Computer Science.

The entire robot game project was developed by a five-woman team, which resulted in three different projects belonging to each study. The design engineering task was carried out by analysing the component needs, taking in consideration all the important factors involved, to recognize problems and limitations, and focus on prototypes. The development process included concept generation and evaluation, prototyping and detail design and testing and refinement of the physical prototype. As a result the prototype showed an intuitive way to play the game, and a 3D CAD model was developed to show an alternative design which found solutions to some of the problems shown by the physical one.