Using the Website

Project Page

The Project Pages were created in an effort to help promote student projects. The Project Pages provide a showcase where employers, other students, and friends can see what UIUC students are capable of. Many employers, in particular, consider a good Senior Design Project to be just as valuable as internship experience. The Project Pages will develop over time into a valuable library of practical engineering knowledge. Some of the best projects will be identified each semester and placed in the Senior Design "Hall of Fame," while the rest will be accessible by semester and search engine.

Updating Project Information

Once your project has been approved on the discussion board by the Instructor, you should promptly update your project information. In order to do so, find your project on the Project page, and click its title. When a frame expands, click on "Edit." Next, enter your UIUC netid and password. The system will lookup your project and prompt you for information such as your project's title. Please fill in the information that you wish to have appear for your project, and then click on the submit button. The required fields are marked so. You can update this information at any time. We strongly urge you to keep a backup of all of the information, and we would like to caution you of one scenario in particular. If multiple people attempt to edit this information at the same time, the second person to submit the changes will overwrite the first person's changes. Also, be sure to logout when you are done by closing the web browser. It is important that you provide a project desciption. It should be a brief overview of your project and explanation of why it is worth doing. Please provide this information as soon as possible and try to limit the length to about 250 words.

Submit Schedule

After updating your project information, you should proceed to the Submit Schedule page. Here each student should submit his/her schedule so that your TA can schedule a weekly meeting time. We know that there are a lot of boxes to check, but we need this detailed information because of how difficult it is to match schedules. The information is displayed in a convenient way for TAs when it is time for them to schedule meeting times. The system is very intuitive so instructions are not needed. NOTE: Please be sure that the schedule you submit is as accurate as possible, since you won't be able to edit it later!

After submitting your schedule, you should familiarize yourself with the "Upload Files" page.

Uploading Files

This area is used to upload files such as the Proposal, the Final Paper, Images, and additional files. When a file is uploaded, it is renamed and limited to a specified size. Special documents such as Proposals and Final Papers should be uploaded into the appropriate slot and will automatically be added to your Project Page. Images and other files can be uploaded into any other slot such as "file1." To upload a file, simply select which slot to place it in, and then select the file from your computer using the "Browse" button.

Dynamic Legged Robot

Joseph Byrnes, Kanyon Edvall, Ahsan Qureshi

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

Project Videos