The Swinging Machine is a robot that swings sideways and swings over itself to move forward. Our first prototype model was made out of cardboard so we could get a sense on what we were making. Our second prototype was made out of wood, and we attached servos to them, so we could test if the robot actually worked. We also changed our hand design. Instead of using electomagnets, we designed a clamp design. We originally decided that we wanted to make our final project out of acrylic but the acrylic kept on braking. We made a few adjustments, and eventually decided to make the Swinging Machine out of wood instead of acrylic.

The first week of building, we sketched out ideas of what we would like our design to be. We came up with an idea that we all really liked: a fantasy car that was based on the idea of a robot that would swing forward on a monkey bar-like infrastructure and electromagnets embedded in the hands of the robot would clamp onto the bars. However, since the robot swings forward, we were worried that when the robot lets go of the monkey bar to reach ahead and grabs another, there would be too much torque for the servos to handle.  We eventually got to a design where the motors produced enough torque for the hands to get around without any issues.

In a world, where the earth has been completely flooded by global warming. Humanity now survives on floating dock cities that are anchored to the tallest peaks in the world, mars has now become colonized, the boat car is the most popular mode of transportation as it is equipped with a launcher that can fling objects into orbit so they can be picked up by rockets and be brought to mars. Our first major design iteration was a boat that could travel on both water and used rockets for space travel. Then after we thought of practicality of that design and the difficulty of building such a craft, so we decided to build a boat that could launch an object into orbit. Soon after we started to design our tri-miran we were informed that our boat would not be able to be tested on water because o the limitations of our testing area. We then decided to make a monohull boat (boat with one hull) that could traverse both land and water. These ideas led us to make a boat with water turbines for wheels and that it would use those turbines to drive in water. If we were to continue to work on our boat/car we would attempt to waterproof both the electronics and the other components, then finally test it in the water. Some of the major challenges were getting our motors and the adapters to fit into our hull, we overcame this by using the drill press to widen the holes and used screws to tighten down the holes.