Team Contract Fulfillment :: ECE 445 - Senior Design Laboratory

Team Contract Fulfillment

Description

The team contract fulfillment assignment is a document describing whether the obligations set out in the team contract were met. Project groups should write no more than 2 pages double spaced. This document should have five brief sections each of which corresponds to a section in the team contract:

Project Goals: This section should begin with a short description of what you planned on building at the start of the semester. What were the goals of your project? You should elaborate on whether these goals were met.

Expectations: This section should address whether the expectations set in the “Expectations” section  in your team contract were met. Essentially, were the ground rules your team set out at the start of the semester followed?
Roles: At the beginning of the course, your team outlined roles as part of the team contract. Please describe what your roles are now and–if your roles changed–how they evolved as the semester progressed. Did you assign a leader? Were pieces of the project tackled as a group or individually? Why?
Agenda: How did your team make decisions about the project? How were goals set? When an issue with the project came up, how did your team plan to fix it?
Team Issues: This section should cover team-related issues that your group encountered during the course. What sort of problems did you run into? How were they dealt with? Was the process set out in the team contract followed?  In hindsight could you have done things differently to have a better team experience?

Requirements and Grading

Each section is worth 4 points. Points are awarded based on thoroughness. A section that adequately addresses the questions above will receive 4 points.

Submission and Deadlines

The team contract fulfillment document is a group assignment and should be submitted on canvas before the deadline listed on the Calendar.

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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