Special Circuit :: ECE 445 - Senior Design Laboratory

Special Circuit

A student whose Senior Thesis Project (ECE 499) does not involve the design and construction or testing of electronic devices or hardware is required to complete a Special Circuit Project in the ECE 445 lab during the semester they take ECE 499. In addition, students enrolled in ECE 445 who are not undertaking a hardware dominant project are required to complete the special circuit (although this is strongly discouraged and the course staff will work with your team to make sure you have enough hardware in your project to avoid having to complete the special circuit.)

The special circuit is typically posted in the middle of the semester. Once you sign up for the special circuit (see below), you will be assigned a TA, a locker, and a special circuit which generally takes about 12-15 hours to complete. When you have it designed and built, you will give a functional demonstration to your TA, who will then inform the professor who will inform undergraduate advising that your task is complete. You are NOT required to attend any of the classes, reviews, demos, or presentations associate with the ECE 445 class.

Sign up for Spring 2020 is now open

Sign up for the Special Circuit assignment on the Lab Access page. Instructions for completing the special circuit will then be provided in the near future. Please check this page for updates.

Link to all Special Circuit design problems. 

Dynamic Legged Robot

Joseph Byrnes, Kanyon Edvall, Ahsan Qureshi

Featured Project

We plan to create a dynamic robot with one to two legs stabilized in one or two dimensions in order to demonstrate jumping and forward/backward walking. This project will demonstrate the feasibility of inexpensive walking robots and provide the starting point for a novel quadrupedal robot. We will write a hybrid position-force task space controller for each leg. We will use a modified version of the ODrive open source motor controller to control the torque of the joints. The joints will be driven with high torque off-the-shelf brushless DC motors. We will use high precision magnetic encoders such as the AS5048A to read the angles of each joint. The inverse dynamics calculations and system controller will run on a TI F28335 processor.

We feel that this project appropriately brings together knowledge from our previous coursework as well as our extracurricular, research, and professional experiences. It allows each one of us to apply our strengths to an exciting and novel project. We plan to use the legs, software, and simulation that we develop in this class to create a fully functional quadruped in the future and release our work so that others can build off of our project. This project will be very time intensive but we are very passionate about this project and confident that we are up for the challenge.

While dynamically stable quadrupeds exist— Boston Dynamics’ Spot mini, Unitree’s Laikago, Ghost Robotics’ Vision, etc— all of these robots use custom motors and/or proprietary control algorithms which are not conducive to the increase of legged robotics development. With a well documented affordable quadruped platform we believe more engineers will be motivated and able to contribute to development of legged robotics.

More specifics detailed here:

https://courses.engr.illinois.edu/ece445/pace/view-topic.asp?id=30338

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