February 13, 2019 - Plans moving forward and short presentation

Today, a guest speaker gave a presentation on transportation systems like BART and PRT. He argued that the only way personal rapid transportation could be competitive is for the small-scale team to showcase a professional model that would demonstrate the timing PRT will work under. The problem with this and our current situation with Spartan Superway is the funding allocated to small teams. Because of this, we will continue to build and design the track using aluminum rails and the modular design presented to us from last year's designed.

The guest speaker also mentioned a new track design that would show how the PRT system will work between cities. To further elaborate, the track will have a general outer loop where the bogeys can traverse between cities and splits into smaller loops, called "offline stations", where the pod car moves into the specific "city" targeted where it can drop off the riders and recharge its battery (inductive charging in our case).

This would mean that our team is going to more than likely scrap the y-section design from last semester. This is so that our design could match more with what the guest speaker imagined a transit system like Spartan Superway will work. We will generally keep last years design and instead focus on adding another offline station to the system. This will benefit future small scale teams as they can further add to the track by adding another city and offline station loops. Future teams will also benefit from our track bender, which would make bending the aluminum much easier and time effective. By finishing up the new track bender, putting the entire track together will be more efficient since the turns would not have to be forced together with the straights since the resulting radius will be more accurate.

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