Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
24 Autonomous Transport Car
 Size Feng
Xinyue Lu
Zhixin Chen
Zhuozheng He
 design_document1.pdf
final_paper3.pdf
proposal1.pdf
 Chushan Li
## Team Members

- Zhixin Chen(zhixinc3)
- Zhuozheng He(zh37)
- Size Feng(sizef2)
- Xinyue Lu(xinyue15)

## Problem

We have found that most warehouses still use manual management for inbound and outbound operations. This mode requires a high level of manual labor. Therefore, we decided to design a small autonomous vehicle for small warehouses that can automatically pick up pieces. The car will find the designated goods as needed, move them away, and place them in the designated area. This design can simultaneously avoid picking up goods by mistake and reduce the pressure and cost of warehouse management.

## Solution Overview

Our car will be tested and displayed in a simplified shelf environment designed by ourselves. The shelf environment will consist of several arranged shelves, guide lines on the ground, and several demonstration goods with RFID chips. The car will find the corresponding goods based on the information provided in the app, and use the mechanical structure to grab them and place them on the designated platform. If time permits, we will optimize for car movement speed, gripping speed, and the app platform human-computer interaction.

## Solution Components

### Mechanical Subsystem

- Car subsystem: The car will plan the optimal route based on the location of the goods and travel faster along the predetermined trajectory on the ground.

- Grab subsystem: After the car comes to a stop, the robotic arm can move to the designated position and grab the goods without touching other objects. Always hold onto the goods until they are transported to the designated pickup platform.

- Identify subsystem: Using RFID technology to identify the specific location of goods on the shelves. We will place RFID chips on the goods in advance.

- Interactive subsystem: Use the mobile app to give instructions to the car to retrieve the goods. The mobile app will receive feedback that the goods have been placed on the pickup platform or do not exist.

### Power Subsystem

The driving PCB board of the car, the driving circuit of the robotic arm, and the circuit recognized by the RFID chip are independently powered.

### Criterion for Success

- The car can travel along the trajectory at a fast speed to a designated position.
- It can correctly identify the goods that need to be grabbed
- The mechanical structure on the car can grab the goods on the shelves and transport them
- A simple app for issuing instructions and receiving feedback

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