TEAM 1.

Team Organization Evaluation and Plans: The team decided to use a concept
of a rotating leader for the organization of the team. Camilo Reyes was
assigned as the leader of this particular project. This style of
organization will give each person on the team a chance to lead a project.
One important job of the leader is to coordinate tasks and keep everyone
informed on how things are going. The team also decided to allocate
rotating tasks so that not one person in the group was given a general
responsibility such as hardware, software, or paperwork; instead the team
would assign one particular person to do one job, then another person would
take on a different task as it seemed clear of what is to be done. This
style of organization led us into working with different parts of the
robot, and a general exposure to the project as a whole. Given the small
timeframe to complete this project the team was forced to arrange itself
into a more democratic organization in which everyone was involved in every
step of the decision making. As the project progressed the team went trough
a decentralization phase where one person was given the robot to take home,
and the next day the team would meet again to see what progress has been
done and what changes have taken place on the robot. Lots of time was also
spent during the fine tuning part of the project. For this last phase, the
team as a whole went through a sleepless night of figuring out the proper
parameters that would make the robot work properly. Our team organization
suffered somewhat given the small timeframe, and small number of team
members to complete the project; we believe this sort of project is meant
more for one person, however having a group of members with different ideas
working on the project helps a lot. The project was a success for the team;
the team believes a successful demonstration was done at the end, but we
wish that the robot would have been more accurate and that it had completed
the course without  help  as it did in our test runs. The team believes our
overall organization looks good on paper, however the actual implementation
of the project does not always seem to follow what has been written.
Milestones were indeed completed in a timely fashion, every team member did
their best to contribute to the project, and we believe the project was a
success. The team organization worked out well, therefore a fall back plan
was never needed; our team members stood together until the end and solved
many number of challenges that came up as the project progressed. Perhaps a
primary lesson to be learned from this project is that building a robot is
not as simple as it seems. When we read the description of the project, we
assumed that it would be fairly easy. After all, our robot only needed to
be able to perform three simple tasks: drive straight, turn accurately, and
recognize colors. In reality, while all of those tasks proved to be more
difficult than we anticipated, the true difficulty arose in the