Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
4 SoftReach Arm
Jinwen Wang
Junyi Chen
Ruxi Deng
Zhian Xie
 design_document1.pdf
proposal1.pdf
 Shi Ye
# SoftReach Arm

SoftReach Arm is a robotic system that combines **vision-based object detection** with a **soft manipulator** for object grasping.

## Project Goal

The goal of this project is to evaluate the benefits of **compliance** in robotic manipulation, particularly when dealing with uncertainty in:

- object pose
- object geometry

By integrating visual perception with a compliant soft arm, the system aims to improve robustness and adaptability during grasping tasks.

## Actuation Method

The soft manipulator will be driven by **pneumatic actuation**. Pneumatic systems can generate fast and large deformations while maintaining a relatively simple structure, making them suitable for **soft robotic manipulation**.

In addition, pneumatic actuation is convenient to implement within a **short-term capstone project**, allowing the system to be built and tested efficiently.

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