So, what do I mean by Bench Marking?
Benchmarking typically refers to research on previous designs related to your project. The source of this could be a previous generation of the same product or from more unrelated products. An example of the later, is some benchmarking research I was doing to make a low-cost linear actuator for a haptic device I was working on for my Ph.D. For this I looked at actuator designs found in old 3.5″ floppy disk drives and CD-Roms and my first Critical Function Prototype used a canibalized 3.5″ floppy disk along with some custom brackets. -wil
So what this means for the groups that are presenting is that you will not only identify relavent technologies in your project area, but also from other products and technologies that apply to your project. Most importantly, you will say what’s good and bad about the things you’ve benchmarked (i.e., list these on your slides). You need to communicate what you’ve found and share your engineering judgement concerning whether it’s a good or bad solution and why.