Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
6 Judo sensor vest
Alexander Gaynor
Janak Mehta
Max Baumgartner
Sam Sagan design_document0.pdf
final_paper0.pdf
presentation0.pdf
proposal0.pdf
DESCRIPTION:

A prevalent problem that has persisted in Judo especially during competitions is scoring. Even after the inclusion of video cameras there have been controversial decisions in higher level tournaments including the Olympics.

The goal is to develop a non-intrusive vest that can measure the amount of force and the area of impact that a throw produces and give a suggested score. We also wish to be able to keep track of the score/time when a user has been pinned to the mat and as a safety feature we wish to include a tap-sensor which can indicate to judges when a user wishes to tap out and end the match with little to no injury.

IMPLEMENTATION:

We plan to configure the vest with accelerometers and force sensors to detect throws and pins. The circuit will be controlled by a micro-controller with a battery power source. To prevent the vest from interfering with matches we wish to use Bluetooth or some other wireless communication to send data about a throw/pin/arm-bar to a computer which will then process the data and issue a score depending on which sensors were activated. We also wish to make this as compact and non-intrusive as possible.

TESTING:

To limit our scope, we're only trying to use this vest for light to medium weights 60-72 kg and also limit our sensing to a series of basic moves including pins, throws and arm-bars, for the sake of ensuring reproducibility of results. The vest needs to be able to withstand wear and tear without damaging the circuitry or the user. To confirm the correctness of our design we could compare our throws with the vest on with other trials using force-plates.

Team Members:

Max Baumgartner(mtbaumg2)
Alex Gaynor(bchmnng2)
Janak Mehta(jrmehta3)

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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