Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
2 iPhone Ultrasound
 Adam Keen
Dean Santarinala
Jonathan Adam
 Mustafa Mir design_document0.pdf
final_paper0.pdf
presentation0.pdf
proposal0.pdf
Our project will use an iPhone 4S to perform an optical A-scan ultrasound. An A-scan is a 1-dimensional ultrasound scan ophthalmologists use to measure the axial lengths of eyeball components. These measurements of the eye are used to calculate intraocular lens power for cataract surgeries. Probes typically operate at 10MHz since the short distances in the eyeball require high resolution. While there are handheld ultrasound probes available, they all use processor/video/input hardware created specifically for that device - driving up its cost while having a poor UI. Many doctors now already carry this hardware around in their pocket on a smartphone, so why not utilize it to drive down medical device costs and improve their user interfaces? The phone could also provide power to the probe, making this a valuable tool to doctors in areas where the only power available may be in their pocket.

We propose connecting a probe tip to a transmitter/receiver circuit, which would also perform any necessary pre-processing of incoming data. The data would be sent via the new low-energy Bluetooth standard to an iPhone 4S, where the data is further processed, results are displayed, and IOL (intraocular lens) calculations are performed. Hopefully the circuit could be powered by the 3.3V accessory power pin on iPhones, but this remains to be determined. Alternatively, a small battery will power the circuit. We have a donated probe tip and iPhone 4S at our disposal.

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

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