Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
67 Vehicle Fever Detection System
Rahul Rajkumar
Vinayak Dhanawade
Vishnu Rathnam
Dean Biskup design_document3.pdf
design_document4.pdf
design_document2.pdf
other1.pdf
other2.docx
other3.pdf
proposal1.pdf
Team Members:

Rahul Rajkumar, Vinayak Dhanawade, Vishnu Rathnam

rahulrr2, vinayak2, rathnam3

Problem:

A problem that we currently face in society due to the state of the COVID 19 pandemic is that rideshare/taxi driver and patrons are put at a high risk of transmitting COVID 19 by being in close proximity to others in an enclosed space as well as by touching surfaces that are frequently used and touched by many others. While masks suffice to prevent spread in open spaces, their effectiveness is severely limited in an enclosed space with limited ventilation like a car.

Solution Overview :

Our solution to this problem to is implement a system that can be mounted on the interior door of vehicles that extends an IR thermometer out the window to check riders temperatures before they enter the vehicle. The system will then alert the driver via a digital display as to whether the current passenger has a fever or not and give the specific temperature. The driver can then decide on a plan of action with this information in order to effectively limit the spread of COVID 19 and ensure both their safety and that of future passengers. This system also has applications in the future after the pandemic in that drivers can choose whether or not to accept riders that are sick in general based on whether or not they have a fever, a common flu symptom.\

Solution components ;

[subsystem #1 : Mechanical arm] :
The mechanical arm system will rest in the passenger seat, and will extend a thermometer out of the open window when the window is opened. To automate this process, we will affix an ultrasonic sensor to the module so that when the window is lowered, the arm extends the thermometer out to take a reading. This provides the driver with convenient control over this arm subsystem.

[subsystem #2 : Fever detection] :
In order to determine whether or not the potential passenger has a fever, we will be using an IR thermometer affixed to an extending mechanical arm, with its data being sent to an arduino.

[subsystem #3 : Driver Display and Linking] :
This is a digital control panel for the driver to receive data and a recommended course of action based on the thermometer’s reading. The control panel will thus have to be linked to the thermometer such that the driver knows whether to allow a passenger in or not.

Criteria for Success :

The high-level goals for this project include building the mechanical arm with an ultrasonic sensor, building the temperature reading system, and linking these to a convenient hub for the driver to use. In order for our project to effectively tackle this problem, we need for the arm to successfully extend the thermometer out of the car window whenever the window is lowered. Additionally, a criteria we require is for the thermometer to accurately read temperatures and send this data to an arduino. Finally, we must have an informational display to provide the driver with necessary information such as the temperature of the potential passenger, and the recommended course of action. For this display to work properly we require that it is efficiently connected to the other components of the overall system.

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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