15 Aug 2020

Dust Bin Redesign

I designed a solution to a consumer facing issue, validated it and saw it to mass production

Robotics Advanced Development team, Mechanical Engineering Co-op

I had the pleasure of working on the Robotics Advanced Development team at Shark Ninja working on the Fall 2020 line of autonomous robot vacuums. Due to a unique management structure, I had the opportunity and the responsibility to determine the projects and the tasks that would be most useful to the team and it’s long term goals.

Dust Bin Redesign

“It was difficult to get my fingers into the space where the dust was clinging. I found it best to use something to insert and try to get the dust out” -Consumer

For this project, I found that many users were complaining that they had difficulty emptying the dust out of their robot vacuums. I requested that I dive into the problem and solve it before we came out with the next model. This led me down a three month task of determining the causation of the problem, designing an effective solution, creating a test to validate that I had satisfactorily solved the problem, validating all other aspects of my design, coordinating with the manufacturing team in China, and getting the design and the tooling investment approved for mass production.


CAD design


Test Rig