Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
30 Design and Build a Spherical Bionic Tensegrity Robot
 Ruiqi Dai
Yaoqi Shen
Yuan Fang
Yuhao Xu
 design_document1.docx
proposal1.docx
Team Members:
-Yuan Fang (yuanf4) -Yaoqi Shen (yaoqis2) -Ruiqi Dai (ruiqid3) -Yuhao Xu (yuhaoxu3)

Problem
Hard robots are not friendly ito contact with people or fragile objects with a close distance since the rigid components, .while the conventional sphere integral robots were driven mostly by electric motors, which were often large and could not adapt to complex environments

Solution
To solve the problem, we plan to use a spherical tensegrity structure consisting of bars and strings to build the robot. The strings only bear the tension and the bars only bear the pressure. This structure is similar to the musculoskeletal system of animals. The robot will be controlled by the PCB circuit. The wireless communication system will communicate with the interactive interface and the PCB circuit. Additionally, the battery is fixed on the rods to provide power to the circuit.

Subsystem 1
The wireless communication will be through the WiFi module integrated in ESP32. It will achieve communication between devices under the same WiFi. The circuit board is the server, and different response functions are designed according to different client requests to control the output of the circuit board.

Subsystem 2
The batteries can charge the PCB circuit, and they will be fixed on rods, which may add to the balance weight issue. To balance the weight, we will try different types of batteries that vary in weight and size. We will also design the location to attach the batteries to keep the balance.

Subsystem 3
Mechanical ball structure optimization scheme. The original foundation of the overall tension structure is realized by 6 hard rods + 24 elastic ropes of liquid crystal elastomers. Now, our design goal is to replace three of the hard rods into the battery and PCB board integration package, after the change, the overall structure will be due to material changes, stiffness and other static characteristics will change, at the same time, it will also cause a change in the movement mode.

Subsystem4
PCB circuit control design. The goal of the PCB circuit is to achieve heating of the elastomer, and dynamically activate the thermal pattern change of different elastomers according to the needs of the path movement structure. Therefore, it is first necessary to design a circuit schematic for controlling multiple elastomers with a single circuit board, verify it through experiments, and test the requirements for replacing the hard rod after integration with the battery. The board will interact under the communication module.

Criterion for success
A stable LCE tensegrity structure with PCB and Battery integrated.

Implement control of robot roll in the different directions with untethered electronically control.

moving on the experimental surface, where can keep stable and keep moving without adjustment

BusPlan

Featured Project

# People

Scott Liu - sliu125

Connor Lake - crlake2

Aashish Kapur - askapur2

# Problem

Buses are scheduled inefficiently. Traditionally buses are scheduled in 10-30 minute intervals with no regard the the actual load of people at any given stop at a given time. This results in some buses being packed, and others empty.

# Solution Overview

Introducing the _BusPlan_: A network of smart detectors that actively survey the amount of people waiting at a bus stop to determine the ideal amount of buses at any given time and location.

To technically achieve this, the device will use a wifi chip to listen for probe requests from nearby wifi-devices (we assume to be closely correlated with the number of people). It will use a radio chip to mesh network with other nearby devices at other bus stops. For power the device will use a solar cell and Li-Ion battery.

With the existing mesh network, we also are considering hosting wifi at each deployed location. This might include media, advertisements, localized wifi (restricted to bus stops), weather forecasts, and much more.

# Solution Components

## Wifi Chip

- esp8266 to wake periodically and listen for wifi probe requests.

## Radio chip

- NRF24L01 chip to connect to nearby devices and send/receive data.

## Microcontroller

- Microcontroller (Atmel atmega328) to control the RF chip and the wifi chip. It also manages the caching and sending of data. After further research we may not need this microcontroller. We will attempt to use just the ens86606 chip and if we cannot successfully use the SPI interface, we will use the atmega as a middleman.

## Power Subsystem

- Solar panel that will convert solar power to electrical power

- Power regulator chip in charge of taking the power from the solar panel and charging a small battery with it

- Small Li-Ion battery to act as a buffer for shady moments and rainy days

## Software and Server

- Backend api to receive and store data in mongodb or mysql database

- Data visualization frontend

- Machine learning predictions (using LSTM model)

# Criteria for Success

- Successfully collect an accurate measurement of number of people at bus stops

- Use data to determine optimized bus deployment schedules.

- Use data to provide useful visualizations.

# Ethics and Safety

It is important to take into consideration the privacy aspect of users when collecting unique device tokens. We will make sure to follow the existing ethics guidelines established by IEEE and ACM.

There are several potential issues that might arise under very specific conditions: High temperature and harsh environment factors may make the Li-Ion batteries explode. Rainy or moist environments may lead to short-circuiting of the device.

We plan to address all these issues upon our project proposal.

# Competitors

https://www.accuware.com/products/locate-wifi-devices/

Accuware currently has a device that helps locate wifi devices. However our devices will be tailored for bus stops and the data will be formatted in a the most productive ways from the perspective of bus companies.