Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
29 Sign Language Teaching Glove
Daniel Fong
Mayapati Tiwari
Reebbhaa Mehta
Igor Fedorov design_document0.pdf
final_paper0.pdf
presentation0.ppt
proposal0.pdf
We are making a glove which will be able to teach a person sign language. The vocabulary will consist of the alphabet and round about 20-30 words. It will have gyroscopes in each of the fingers and flex sensors throughout the length of the fingers to know the position of the fingers and that of the hands relative to each other. The information will be sent to a microcontroller via bluetooth which will determine what the person has said and check if the actions performed were correct. If the gesture is correct the LEDs (that will run along the back of your fingers) will turn green, otherwise they will be red, if only one finger is out of place in your gesture only the leds running along that finger will remain red. The other mechanism we are implementing for feedback control is haptic feedback, using a vibration motor in every glove finger, it will vibrate to alert you about the incorrect placement of your finger.

The app will have a practice mode through which you can practice the gestures, and once you are confident that you know the actions, you can test yourself and the app will tell you how you fared.

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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