Outsourcing was too expensive, so our mechanical team lead, Jeremy, spent most of last summer practicing welding techniques before being confident enough to start constructing the chassis.
Rachel Abril, a member of the project's mechanical team, spoke to BBC Future at the team's Stanford workshop.
The mechanical team is responsible for designing and building the robot's chassis: its frame, waterproof capsules and actuators.
The guys behind us have worked so hard for the last six weeks or so - the mechanical team and the electrical team from Bristol University - so I've got to put my faith in them because they've done all the hard work up to now.
More recently, they demonstrated the progress of this mechanical team with a video showing them collaborating on a glass work of art, melting tubes and arranging them together in a cylindrical chandelier.
SIMAS, with support from the Swiss Foundation for Mine Action (FSD), has since been through a strenuous vetting process to become a United Nations-approved demining organization and now has two manual clearance teams and an explosive ordnance disposal team and a mechanical team who work to prepare the ground for deminers.
We have a lot of heads-up stuff challenges: our bio-mechanical team tells them who's the slowest, who's the fastest, so we challenge them that way every day.
The main objective of this study is to propose an integrated approach, which combines two multi-decision criteria decision-making techniques, to select the most appropriate mechanical design team in construction projects.
However, in practice, the selection of the mechanical design team is usually made based on the lowest bid criterion, which may result in additional costs due to working with unqualified, incapable, and insufficient companies.
