End-to-End Component Ownership: Own the mechanical design of motors, gear trains, and actuator housings from concept through mass production. You’re accountable for performance, manufacturability, cost, and reliability of the components you draw.
Detailed Design & CAD: Produce high-fidelity 3D CAD models and 2D engineering drawings with comprehensive GD&T and datum strategies. Design for assembly, design for manufacturing, and design for the inspection methods your suppliers actually have.
Tolerance & Interface Management: Perform dimensional stack-up analysis on critical-to-function interfaces — air gaps, gear meshes, bearing fits, preload paths. Define and defend the tolerances that matter and open up the ones that don’t.
Supplier Coordination: Work directly with suppliers to ensure prompt delivery of parts. Run RFQs, technical feasibility reviews, and troubleshoot manufacturing issues during prototype and production builds. Build the kind of supplier relationships that get you parts on time when things go sideways.
Test Plan Definition: Partner with modeling and test engineers to define test plans for optimization and durability of your components — characterization runs, life tests, environmental tests, and the failure-mode-specific tests that catch the issues a generic protocol misses.
Characterization Support: Provide the mechanical engineering support required during actuator characterization — fixtures, instrumentation interfaces, teardown analysis, and the iterative design changes that come out of test data.
Design Iteration from Data: Close the loop between test results, model predictions, and your CAD. When a part fails or a model says it shouldn’t have, you’re the one who figures out why and what to change.
Cross-Functional Integration: Work closely with modeling, test, electronics, controls, and systems engineers. Your components live inside a larger robot, and the best mechanical design in the world doesn’t matter if it doesn’t integrate.