PYTHON ASSIGNMENT

This activity is meant to help you practice top-down design, outside the context of programming. Well look at an engineering challenge, and your team is to use a top-down design approach to describe how you would go about approaching the challenge. This is meant to be very broad and open-ended, and you are not expected to know the details of how individual pieces of this might work. The idea here is to get you to think of the problems that would need to be solved in order to meet this larger challenge. The goal is for you to be able to take a large, broad problem, and decompose it into smaller problems, repeatedly, until you have reached problems that seem small enough that they have a more straightforward solution.

Your team should pick one of these 3 options (each of these exists but the assumption is that you are not familiar with them already):

An autonomous personal movement device essentially an autonomous wheelchair. The device should operate with the same capabilities as a standard motorized wheelchair, but be able to operate autonomously, rather than being controlled directly by the person in the chair.

A system for automatically inspecting rigid parts coming off of an assembly line, to examine whether they match some shape design. The process should not require human intervention, and you can assume pieces are coming off on a conveyor belt or some similar device.

A system for retrieving devices that are at the bottom of the ocean. You can assume that the devices are emitting some sort of signal of your choice.

As a team, come up with a hierarchy stating the problems to be solved in creating such a system. Your base in this case should be something like Autonomous Wheelchair, with the next level of the hierarchy being the major problems that you would need to address in creating the device. Each of those problems should be further decomposed into smaller problems and so forth.

Your hierarchy should have a minimum of 5 levels, and at most 7 levels (not every branch of the hierarchy needs to go to the maximum depth, but many should). Because this is a very broad problem, in theory you could go into far more detail; that is not needed here. However, the leaves of your tree should be reasonably straightforward and less open-ended problems to be solved (e.g. things that have been done before, might have an off-the-shelf solution, or might still be new things, but at a level that its reasonable to expect a small team of people to be able to address them).

This should be done as a team, and the hierarchy should be written in a document that you submit in PDF form. You may use any office software (e.g. Word, Powerpoint) that you find most useful in creating your hierarchy.