SCOPE Stories Week 1: Wait, We're in the Robo Lab?

Seniors at Olin have two options for year-long capstones, Affordable Design and Entrepreneurship and SCOPE. ADE focuses on identifying opportunities and developing products/services to meet needs in underserved areas around the world. Most people, though, take SCOPE, in which each team of four to six students is sponsored by a company. SCOPE teams meet all day on Wednesday, and our first day was this week! 

I'm on the Boston Scientific (BoSci) team along with three other Olin seniors. We're a pretty diverse group in terms of major; we have a Mechanical Engineering major, an Engineering with Materials Science major, an Engineering with Physics major, and then me (mechE but very mathematical). We won't know until next week what we're allowed to say publicly about our project, but it's a good fit for all of us. It was my top choice of the projects, and I'm really excited for the rest of the year.

This week, our main task was to set up our work spaces. To our surprise, my team's space is in the Intelligent Vehicles lab, despite having nothing to do with robotics. In fact, we don't expect to use any of the tools or machines in the IV lab. We found out that Boeing was originally going to be in that spot, and their project is much more mechanical. However, the other team whose space is in the lab is Locus Robotics, and one of their team members is not a US citizen or permanent resident. Boeing's non-disclosure agreement this year requires that the signee be at least a permanent resident, and teams in the same space have to cross-sign each other's NDAs. To resolve this, the SCOPE organizers swapped Boeing and BoSci, and thus my team ended up in the Robo lab.

Question (to be answered next week): What do the Harley-Davidson team and the BoSci team have in common?