FIRE DETECTION DRONE SYSTEM DESIGN

My first engineering design project at the University of Toronto was in my first semester in 2017. My team and I were tasked with designing a fire detection system capable of quickly detecting forest fires in Ontario, Canada and relaying that information to fire control centers. Many of the current methods such as satellite imagery are of high costs and do not function as quickly/efficiently as needed. My team and I found that a solar-powered drone with picture analysis technology was the most optimal design. My tasks was designing one of the alternatives, which consisted of poles placed throughout the forests of Ontario with heat detection sensors on top to detect any fires. 

The engineering document and its syntax was only just introduced to my team, making it the first time that we implemented it in practice. The importance of critical and objective thinking in engineering was stressed by our professors, as well as the ability to decipher a problem into its simplest form. I learned that one should be as precise as possible when relaying information as an engineer, something I surprisingly found to be harder than just a story-like way of relaying information. The engineering document required that you fully understand what you are talking about, because it would be obvious to a technical reader if you did not. Functions, objectives, constraints, and a problem statement was written, as well as the design of three alternatives. Tools such as weighted decision matrix and pairwise comparison was used to rank our objectives and compare them to our alternatives. This helped us objectively determine the most optimal design. Ultimately, I learned the importance of having a team in which the values of all members aligned, as well as the elegance of an engineering document. I have found that I much prefer engineering documents compared to essays or lab reports, as it allows you to get straight to the point in clear, concise language, and has a layout that makes it easier to read. Essentially, this project was the beginning of a complete transformation of my approach to analysing problems and possible solutions.