Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
3 Follow-Me Cart: App controlled smart assistant
 Alex Huang
Jiaming Gu
Shi Qiao
 Shengkun Cui design_document1.pdf
other1.pdf
proposal1.pdf
Here's the following of the previous post due to word limitations:

## Subsystem 3: Mobile App
Purpose: Allow customers to control the cart via app.
Features: 1. BLE(bluetooth low energy) pairing with the Raspberry Pi for secure identification.
2. Enable/ disable follow-me mode.
3. adjust the following distance, receive notifications when the cart is too far from the user.
Components: 1. Customized Android app
2. BLE/Wi-Fi for control and ID verification.

## Subsystem 4: Drive Subsystem

Purpose: Drive the car
Components: 1. 12V DC gear motors.
2. Chassis: 2-wheel drive with caster support for balance.
3. Payload capacity: 5–10 kg (scaled for safety and feasibility).
4.Power system: 12V Li-ion battery pack with buck converters for 5V (Pi) and 3.3V (sensors/ESP32).
# Criterion For Success

1. The cart follows the user within 1–2 m, with >90% accuracy in aisle-like environments.
2. Our mobile app should connect to the cart within 5 seconds ,respond to any commands sent by users via app within 2 seconds, allow the user to start/stop at any time and adjust the parameters accordingly.
3. The cart follows only when both the paired phone and marker/ID are detected, preventing false tracking.
4. The cart stops for obstacles >10 cm wide within 1 m.
5. The cart might be able to speed up when it is far from the user and slow down when it gets near. In the whole process it should be able to avoid all possible obstacles smoothly.
6. The cart safely carries 5–10 kg without tipping.
7. Max speed capped at ~1.5 m/s (≈3.3 mph).
8. Operates for at least 1 hour per charge at walking speed (0.5 -- 1.5 m/s).

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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