Calendar

Week Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday
1/20
First class meeting 4:00p - 5:50p 1002 ECEB
Initial Post due 11:59p
1/27
Second class meeting 4:00p - 5:50p 1002 ECEB
Early Project Approval due 4:45p
Laboratory safety training due 11:59p
2/3
Third class meeting 4:00p - 5:50p 1002 ECEB
Project approval due 4:45p
2/10
Fourth class meeting 4:00p - 5:50p 3002 ECEB
Proposals due 11:59p
2/17
Design Document Check Sign-up opens
Eagle assignment due 11:59p
Design Document Check Sign-up closes
2/24
Design Document Check
Fliflet: 2072
Design Document Check
Kumar: 2074
Design Document Check
Fliflet: 2072
Design Document Check
Kumar: 2074
Design Document due 11:59p
3/2
Design Review
Fliflet: 2072
Design Review
Fliflet: 2072
Design Review
Fliflet: 2072
3/9
Teamwork Evaluation I due 11:59p
Early Bird PCBway order (5 Bonus points) (MUST PASS AUDIT BY TODAY) due
Soldering assignment due 4:45p
3/16
Spring Break
Spring Break
Spring Break
Spring Break
Spring Break
3/23
First Round PCBway Orders (MUST PASS AUDIT BY TODAY) due
Last day for revisions to the machine shop 1048 ECEB
3/30
Individual progress reports due 11:59p
4/6
Final Round PCBway Orders (MUST PASS AUDIT BY TODAY) due - 11:59p
4/13
4/20
Mock demo During weekly TA mtg
Mock demo During weekly TA mtg
Mock demo During weekly TA mtg
Mock demo During weekly TA mtg
Mock demo During weekly TA mtg
4/27
Demonstration
Fliflet: 2070
Demonstration
Fliflet: 2070
Demonstration
Fliflet: 2070
Mock Presentation
Fliflet: 2072
Mock Presentation
Fliflet: 2072
5/4
Presentation
Fliflet: 2072
Presentation
Fliflet: 2072
Final papers due 11:59p
Lab Notebook Due due 3:00p - 4:30p 2070 ECEB
Lab checkout 3:00p - 4:30p 2070 ECEB
Award Ceremony and Pizza 4:30p - 5:30p 3002 ECEB
Teamwork Evaluation II due 5:00p

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