Team 8 UH

Work Period of April 13 to April 26 During the work period of April 13 to April 26, our team made significant progress toward developing the final concept for the Mechanical StairGlide Luggage project. We narrowed our design direction down to two main mechanical concepts that could potentially meet the project requirements for stair climbing, compact storage, structural safety, and airline dimensional limits. For both designs, we completed CAD drawings to better visualize the geometry, folding/retraction behavior, wheel placement, and overall integration with the luggage body. These CAD models helped us compare how each concept would fit within the suitcase envelope and how the mechanism would interact with standard stair geometry. In addition to CAD development, our team began analyzing the forces acting on each design. We are currently working on free-body diagrams, force calculations, and structural feasibility checks to determine how the load will transfer through the wheel arms, ...

Work Period of March 22 to April 11 During the March 22 to April 11 work period, our team made strong progress in defining the engineering foundation for the Mechanical StairGlide Luggage project and beginning concept selection. Building on the motivation and problem definition from our earlier blogs, we completed Milestone 1 by establishing the project’s key requirements and constraints, including supported load, airline dimensional limits, stair geometry, structural safety, deployment reliability, and pulling-force targets. We also performed baseline stair-pulling tests on a loaded suitcase over more than 20 trials, which showed that stair climbing requires significant user effort and confirmed that wheel–stair interaction and changing contact conditions are major design challenges. At the same time, the team began work that is still in progress under Milestone 2. We are currently comparing multiple deployable stair-climbing concepts, with particular focus on curved-spoke and standa...