OLIVIER DE WECK: One of the key ways of learning
is to look at examples, past examples,
of both successful and failed projects or designs.
What we find in systems engineering
is that often the problems begin at the requirements stage,
where either a requirement is missing, or there's redundancy,
or in some cases requirements are
written that are overly ambitious
and utopian given the time frame and the budget available.
So what you have is always a trade off between how ambitious
you are technically, the schedule,
and the budget that's available, and how much
risk you are willing to take.
And so the students are pushing the envelope
in these different dimensions and learning what's feasible,
what's not feasible, and what can we
learn from past failures.
We can learn from general examples of projects
that had difficulties, either in aerospace,
in the automotive industry, in consumer products.
In hindsight, one is always smarter.
But it is worth to look at these.
Specifically with the CanSat competition,
since the competition has a rich history, and a very active set
of sponsors, and quite a good website as well,
there's a lot of opportunities to learn
from mistakes that other teams have made in the past.
For example, designing a glider where there's not
sufficient tolerances between the vehicle itself
and the container, and basically the deployment doesn't go well.
Another example is designing a glider
that does not fly properly in a circular pattern,
and flies too well actually, and flies off into the woods never
to be seen again.
There's, of course, a lot of lessons learned
from establishing a stable communications link,
from having worked out procedures.
How do you deploy your system?
How do you test it?
How do you communicate with it?
How do you collect it?
How do you post-process the data?
In each of those critical areas, we
see that learning from the past is
critical to avoid mistakes that could be
avoided with these learnings.