Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
21 Solar/Motion Powered Shoe Heater
Area Award: Energy
 Andrew Chavarria
Carlo Delfin Vendiola
Crystal Cardenas
 Igor Fedorov design_document0.document
final_paper0.pdf
presentation0.pdf
proposal0.pdf
We intend to develop a shoe that produces heat with energy generated through polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF), common name is piezo film, while also incorporating solar power. The PVDF material is flexible and its properties are suitable for the project. As for heating the shoe, we were planning on using heating wires, found in heating blankets. We will also develop a user interface app for android that will control desired temperature within the shoe and display a step counter. The microcontroller will communicate with the phone through bluetooth. The energy produced from the PVDF and solar cells will be stored in a rechargeable lithium ion battery which will also power the microcontroller and heat the shoe to the desired temperature.

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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