Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
31 PPE and Worker Tracking System
Area Award: Safety
 Dennis Wong
Joydeep Ganguly
 John Capozzo design_document0.pdf
final_paper0.pdf
presentation0.pdf
proposal0.pdf
Members: Dennis Wong (dywong2) Joydeep Ganguly(jgangul2)

Project Description:

According to the National Safety Council, a worker injury can cost the company up to $30,000 in damages and an OSHA fine can cause a company up to $7000 for minor infractions, including not wearing personal protection equipment (PPE) or operating machinery in an unsafe way. Sensing workplace conditions also allows management to make intelligent on the fly decisions about the amount of break time, and adapt working conditions.

Effective data gathering on worker safety habits also has the potential to significantly reduce company liability, and lead to safer workplace practices. The purpose of this product is to gather worker position, working conditions and worker health data worker data to enable better management decisions in warehouse or factory environments. The concrete product that we would like to make is: a wearable vest with embedded sensors to track worker position, movement, and working conditions, including but not limited to temperature, luminosity, humidity, and the presence of safety equipment in designated “unsafe” areas, e.g. “hard hat zones”.

High Level Design:

Data Acquisition and Processing: The microcontroller will acquire data from the sensor system to both collect data on the workers surroundings and track whether proper safety equipment is worn in certain areas. Proximity and temperature sensors will be used in individual pieces of equipment to tell if it is being worn by a person.

Wireless Communication: The microcontroller will store data form the sensors in a sd card and when it is full it will be sent to a server via wifi. MQTT and AWS are options for this.

Power: The wearable device will be powered by lithium ion batteries daily and will be able to last an entire workday. To conserve power, the wearable will only use the wifi chip when necessary.

Constraints:

The product can not be distracting or bulky since it is a wearable device. Additionally, modifications will have to be made to individual pieces of the personal protection equipment which can not be bulky.

Previous Posts:

https://courses.engr.illinois.edu/ece445/pace/view-topic.asp?id=13731

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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