Design Document Check

updated Fa 2020

Description

The Design Document Check (DDC) is intended to aid your team as it prepares its Design Document. The DDC focuses narrowly upon providing feedback on the preparation of historically problematic Design Document elements. If these elements fall short during your Design Review the following week, precious time is lost.

What are the course staff looking for? i) Evidence that the overall idea of the design is sound; ii) A check of a small subset of required components indicates that the project is on the right track.

The DDC provides feedback on your preparation of the following Design Document elements:

  1. Introduction
    1. Start with a brief summary (30 sec) or elevator pitch following this template:

      I will build ___A___ (my core product) for ___B___ (my core customer: the person who pays my company or uses the product).

      My customer has a problem ___C___ (describe the problem your customer has)

      My product solves my customer’s problem by ___D___ (how do you solve the problem?)

    2. Be expected to explain further what the problem is, what’s your idea to solve it, and why your idea is novel.
  2. High-level Requirements
    1. HL requirements are derived from the problem you are trying to solve (put yourself into the customer's shoes). HL requirements should be the essential features that your customers/users really care about. These features distinguish your product from others (e.g. ones available in the market or previous 445 designs). Be abstract (no tech details, you may come up with different design due to other constraints but still solve this problem), quantifiable (no words like continuously, accurately, etc), and unambiguous. HL&RV slides(P.5) has a good example.
    2. We will look at your HL requirements and check if they are what your customers/users really care about. Be prepared to defend your requirements, so that when you get challenged, you can give a well thought out explanation.
  3. Block Diagram
    1. Block Diagram slides
    2. We will check whether this design appears to solve your problem. 
    3. We will check if formatting is clear (lines, legends, etc). Extra caution is needed as students often make mistakes here (but you shouldn't!).
  4. Physical Design (if applicable)
  5. Requirements & Verification Tables
    1. HL&RV slides: from P. 1-17
    2. Block Module Requirements: Break down your HL requirements into block level requirements. These are the requirements in the RV table (they are not the specs of the parts you have chosen).
    3. Verification: A step-by-step approach allows another 445 student to test if the BL requirement is satisfied. This is like an instruction for your module's unit test (with some surrounding dummy modules, a.k.a, mock object(s)
    4. We will review one piece of it. Show us an important one.
  6. Plots
  7. Circuit Schematics
  8. Tolerance Analysis
    1. Identify an important part that you need to perform some quantitative analysis on. This part should have quantitative values critical to the design and require you do calculations and make trade-offs in order to achieve your best design.
    2. Common mistake: Many students do calculations for tangential parts to pad the space.
  9. Safety & Ethics
  10. Citations

During the DDC, your team will have 5-8 minutes to present an example of each of these elements. Expect to share the 30-minute DDC session with two other design teams. Come prepared to learn from their work - both the good and bad.

Your task is to prepare and upload the above elements in a single PDF document to the course website. During your DDC session, you will present directly from your submission, which will be projected for all to see.

The focus of the DDC is not on the details of your design but rather on the details of your formatting; the design of your project will be covered in-depth during the Design Review. Organize your submission in accordance with the Design Document guidance and the example Design Document.

The course staff will focus on providing feedback on the format of your sample DDC elements - the very limited available time will not afford detailed feedback on your design. Please go to office hours for further guidance.

Requirements and Grading

Upload your DDC submission to your project page on PACE (i.e. ECE 445 web board) before arriving at your DDC session.

As in your Design Document, number pages after the title page in your DDC submission.

An example DDC submission is provided here for reference. The corresponding Design Document for this DDC submission can be found on the Design Document assignment page.

Any material obtained from websites, books, journal articles, or other sources not originally generated by the project team must be appropriately attributed with properly cited sources in a standardized style such as IEEE, ACM, APA, or MLA.

The course staff at the DDC will assign individual grades to each student based on:

Submission and Deadlines

Sign-up for the Design Document Check on the ECE 445 course website - specifically at the Sign up for Team Presentation item on the PACE tab. Sign-up will open the Monday one week prior to the DDCs.

Upload your DDC submission (.pdf format) to the ECE 445 course website before your DDC session - specifically at the My Project item on the PACE tab.

While you will not complete peer reviews during the DDC, you are expected to actively contribute to the discussion.

Tech must-know and FAQ for design

Here is the link of "Tech must-know and FAQ for design" which is accessible after logging into g.illinois.edu.

Over semesters, ECE445 course staff have encountered repeated mistakes from students. The document above is designed to provide students with the essential knowledge needed in order to have a good design. Spending 5 min reading it might save you 15 hours later. Also, there might be some quiz questions in your DDC or Design Review. Please help us improve this document. We value your feedback!

Robot for Gym Exercise Guidance

Zifei Han, Dalei Jiang, Kunle Li, Chang Liu

Featured Project

TEAM MEMBERS

Dalei Jiang (daleij2)

Zifei Han (zifeih2)

Chang Liu (changl12)

Kunle Li (kunleli2)

PROJECT TITLE

Robot for Gym Exercise Guidance

PROBLEM

In modern society, daily fitness is a necessary life choice for healthy people. When it comes to fitness, the standard of movement is very important. However, hiring a coach exclusively for instruction is sometimes not a convenient and economical option. We think robots are perfectly capable of determining whether a person's movements are in place. To this end, we need to propose a scheme to design a robot that can walk behind people and use certain technologies to identify human movements when people are moving, compare with the existing action models, and give an evaluation.

SOLUTION OVERVIEW

Our solution is to design a robot that included a chassis that drove the motion on the bottom and a computer operating system and camera on the top. With ultrasonic radar and cameras, the robot can follow the target. When the "motion assessment" module starts to operate, the camera will capture video information and begin motion analysis at the same time. The analysis of human motion will be completed as soon as possible and the standard evaluation of motion will be given. At the same time, we will design some multimedia files, such as sound and video, to interact with the user.

SOLUTION COMPONENTS

Based on the introduction above, several systems need to be implemented to realize the solution.

SUBSYSTEM 1: BOTTOM MOBILE PLATFORM PROGRAMMING

We plan to take use of the EAI SMART robot platform as the base movement platform of the robot. We will do the programming based on the ROS system to realize automatic navigation, path planning, and object tracking.

SUBSYSTEM 2: SKELETAL BINDING AND MOVEMENT ANALYSIS OF THE HUMAN BODY

The most important part of this program is that we will use the Mask R-CNN to do the skeletal binding to determine the human's movement. We will try to train an efficient model to help us realize fast analysis.

SUBSYSTEM 3: MAN-MACHINE INTERACTIVE SYSTEM

As a user-oriented product, we need to design a friendly human-computer interface to realize the free conversion of functions.

SUBSYSTEM 4: MOVEMENT STANDARD ALGORITHM

We need to devise an algorithm to assess the deviation between the gymnast's movements and the standard. This algorithm is very important for the final product performance feedback.

CRITERION FOR SUCCESS

The robot can self-navigate to find people in the gym.

The robot can monitor the person doing exercise and extract human poses.

The robot can check whether the person is doing correctly in the exercise.

DISTRIBUTION OF WORK

Dalei Jiang: Skeletal binding and movement analysis of the human body

Zifei Han: Bottom mobile platform programming

Chang Liu: Man-machine interactive system building

Kunle Li: Movement standard algorithm designing