In step 2 of my STEM senior year capstone project, the main goal was to breakdown the concept we finalized from step 1 into its component sub functions. For my team's search and rescue drone, we had sub functions including: flight method, communications systems, vision systems, and processing. On top of identifying sub functions, this step also including brainstorming alternative solutions to each sub function and to group them into a classification matrix. Once in the matrix, we were to generate possible alternative concept designs and sketch them out to try and develop other possible solutions without a bias. A link to my group's pallet can be found here- https://padlet.com/admuzzarelli/q7kiegfwueq0. This padlet contains all the various brainstorming processes that went into developing our capstone project.
Above is the classification scheme we developed. The rows are each sub function, and the columns are the alternative solutions we brainstormed for each sub function. Below the classification scheme are five design concepts that combine one randomly selected solution to each sub function into a single possible design concept. To make sure this process was random, we wrote a script to generate the combinations for us, which is shown below.
Last, we chose what we believed were the three best design concepts and created sketches for each of them to further flush out their specifications.