Lectures :: ECE 445 - Senior Design Laboratory

Lectures

Spring 2023 Lecture Material:

 

Lecture #1:

(February 17, 2023)

 

 

Getting Started

  • Welcome to the class! (pptx, pdf)

 

 

Pre-Lecture #2:

(before February 24, 2023)

 

 

Beyond Ideation

 

 

Lecture #2:


(February 24, 2023)

 

 

Moving Forward

  • RFA, Proposal, High-Level Requirements, R&V Tables, and Block Diagram details (Slides)

 

Pre-Lecture #3:


(before March 3, 2023)

 

 

Design and Writing Tips

 

 

Lecture #3:


(March 3, 2023)

 

 

Last stop before the Proposal

  • Introduction (pptx)
  • Proposal Details (pptx)
  • Proposal Logistics (pptx)
  • Lab Notebooks (pptx)

 

Pre-Lecture #4:


(before March 10, 2023)

 

 

PCB Exercise Tips

  • Modular Design & Circuit Debugging (pdf)
  • Why PCB Exercise? (pptx)

 

Lecture #4:


(March 10, 2023)

 

 

Intellectual Property

  • Patents - Henry Wang, President IPwe
  • Weekly Meetings Info (pptx)
  • Proposal Q&A

Spring 2020 Video Lectures:

Brainstorming

Finding a Problem (Video)
Generating Solutions (Video)
Diving Deeper (Video)
Voting (Video)
Reverse Brainstorming (Video)
Homework for Everyone (Video)

Important Information

Using the ECE 445 Website (Video)
Lab Notebook (Video , Slides)
Modular Design (Video, Slides)
Circuit Tips and Debugging (Video , Slides)
Spring 2018 IEEE Soldering Workshop (Slides)

Major Assignments and Milestones

Request for Approval (Video, Slides)
Project Proposal (Video, slides)
Design Document (Video, slides)
Design Review (Video, slides)
Writing Tips (Video, slides)

Dynamic Legged Robot

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