Open public design methodology and design process

This paper proposes a design methodology and design process for mechatronic systems incorporating the public community. As a proof of concept, we are building up robot system consisting of the following components: software code files, hardware design files and controller hardware. Every component will be available for review on an open repository and review tool which is GIT/Gerrit. Designers release components into the repository in form of commits Commits can be downloaded by every community member, examined and reviewed in detail by the public community. At certain time spots we pick a number of commits with positive review results, and review the commits on an overall system perspective. If this review passes, we create a real system from the commits. The steps are: software code compilation, hardware components creation with a 3D printer, controller hardware ordering. Then we build the new robot upon these components. If we can build successfully the robot system (which is expected due to the overall review) and if we are passing all testcases, a new release is created from the picked commits. Every community member can download the latest release for their own usage. The business case for this design methodology and design process, is that we offer to the customer a service to conduct tests from a set of reviewed commits We provide the resources and the knowledge to this service. We inform the customer about the review and test results and the customer can precede improving the system based on the feedback we provide.