SourceAmerica Kitting and Packaging Collegiate Design Competition
For my 2020-2021 senior project at Cal Poly, I have been working with a team of fellow engineers to design, create, and test a kitting and packaging workstation in compliance with the SourceAmerica national collegiate competition guidelines. Section 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act has allowed workplaces to pay workers with disabilities less than minimum wage. Instead they are often paid based on productivity. The goal of this project is to drastically increase the efficiency of this process in order to make these jobs viable work options for those people living with disabilities. Our team placed 3rd in the nation and we could not be more proud!
The following page shows a brief overview of our design for the project. For a full technical report documenting the analysis and design process of our product, click here.
Final Video Documentation
This video was the final video our team produced which is similar to the one we made for the SourceAmerica submission, however, it includes our progress building the prototypes and our testing results. This video was also uploaded to the Cal Poly virtual library as a part of a webpage which has more details and documentation of our product specifications and requirements.
The Design Process
We began our process in September 2020 by conducting background research and interviews to understand our target user better. We then used this information to brainstorm potential solutions for each roadblock. Some initial ideation sessions are listed below.
Critical analysis was done for each one of our subsystems in order to weed out the bad ideas. We then used many decision matrices to determine optimal combinations and solutions for the work station. After weighing the benefits of each design, we settled on one and created our first prototype model in Solidworks.
We took this design into a preliminary design review in late November 2020 with the rest of my senior project class. There, we received feedback and critical design insight from multiple people on how we could improve our design including ergonomic concerns and technical specifications which we did not consider. We used this feedback to redesign our workstation into the current design shown below.
In November, we had a critical design review which brought to light technical concerns about our workstation including concerns about tipping and shaft loads for the bag holding system at the back of the workstation. We revised our design for a third design iteration shown below which we presented to our senior project class in an Interim Design Review in January 2021.
After the Interim Design Review, we redesigned the workstation once again to account for feedback we received. Additionally, we began ordering parts to build a structural prototype of our design to test the fitting of our key subsystems. When we received the bag rolls and heat sealer, we found that we severely underestimated the sizes and had to readjust our design to account for each change. These changes are reflected in our fourth design iteration shown below. This design was taken into a Critical Design Review with our senior project class and safety inspectors in February 2021.
After this design review, we received minor design revision feedback, however, we primarily wanted to focus on ensuring that our design is as safe as possible for the user as it utilizes cutting blades and an impulse heat sealer. We then implemented guards and finalized the CAD model to better reflect actual components and manufacturing processes which we will use to build. Our latest iteration is shown below, which has been updated as of April 11, 2021.
Here is a clip from our project submission video outlining how a user would operate our design.
Prototyping
Due to our limited budget, my team decided that it would be best to create one "column" of the workstation that will house all our key subsystems (one bag roll, one heat sealer, one sorting system, etc). We began constructing a structural prototype in late February 2021 as an early "fit" test of our key components including the bag roll, heat sealer, sorting template, and funnels. The result is shown below.
After finding out that that our systems fit together under our design dimensions, we began developing the heat sealing subsystem. This required us to disassemble make modifications to the switch inside the impulse heat sealer and design custom brackets to put the handle on tracks. The final heat sealer assembly is shown in the following video.
After the heat sealing system was confirmed, we moved to implementing the other systems. This required redesigning the prototype housing to be able to be cut using a waterjet cutter, as well as many other modifications from our original design to accommodate for the single column of the workstation for the prototype. Our completed prototype is shown below.
We used this prototype in a series of tests to verify that our design would be effective, practical, and useful for people with disabilities. These included evaluation tests such as wearing gloves or using one arm to simulate dexterity impairments, idea refinement tests such as the hooking test which tested different bag locations to find the optimum range for reliable bag opening, and safety tests such as the tipping test.
Conclusions and Results
Unfortunately, after testing our design, we found that our prototype was extremely finnicky and inefficient, and the workstation increased the kitting time by an average of 300% when compared to manual kitting. Hopefully if we were given the time and budget to create the full design instead of this abbreviated one and test it on real people with disabilities who may use the device, it would net better results. Still, this project provided me with a unique experience developing a product from start to finish. Additionally, it helped me get introduced to the technical design process used in industry and practice working in a team environment, which I think will translate well when starting my career.
