Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
35 Vehicle Protection System
 Christopher Blount
Michael Jermann
 appendix0.pdf
design_document0.pdf
final_paper0.pdf
presentation0.presentation
proposal0.pdf
Car alarms are ineffective in that they are usually ignored by bystanders and are susceptible to false alarms. We will improve upon current systems by implementing an interactive car protection system that will provide the user with real-time notification during times when the car alarm would typically go off. A cabin-mounted camera will take a series of screenshots, which will be wirelessly transmitted to a smartphone, allowing the user to decide whether or not to take action. The user will take action directly via his/her device through an android app, with the option to sound the alarm, call 911, save screenshots to solid-state memory, or do nothing. We may choose to implement a system of sensors to detect threats or augment the existing car alarm system.

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

Project Videos