This was a very, very small project, but a great example of how good design can save a lot of time and money. While at JPL, we had a robot arm which was designed to manipulate large, heavy structures that we wanted to use for fine manipulations of thin tubes. The team was planning to design and fabricate a new gripper for the arm, a month-long process for multiple engineers which would ultimately cost the project upwards of $60k. I realized we could get the same performance by modifying the existing gripper, and with just a few hours I designed, 3D printed, and installed removable snap-fit gripper fingers that allowed us to switch between manipulation of large and small structures.
Catherine Pavlov 