Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
8 Laser Tag Glove
Alexander Korfel
Carlos Lara
Keng Yan Lim
Jacob Bryan appendix0.zip
design_document0.pdf
final_paper0.pdf
other0.pdf
presentation0.pdf
proposal0.pdf
Our group wants to make a laser tag glove. The idea stems from childhood games where you pretend your hand is a gun. The index finger will emit the laser while the thumb acts as a trigger. We plan on using a contact sensor so the laser beam is shot every time you press your thumb against your index finger with a buzzer sound confirming the shot. The remaining three fingers will have flex sensors, which will ensure the hand has to be in a "finger gun" shape in order to work properly. Also, we will create a vest with 4 sensors in order to detect when each player is hit. At the moment we are planning on implementing the game for two players.

For record keeping, we plan on giving each player's glove an LCD display. The display will show statistics such as kills, deaths, and time remaining in the round. Player one will have 4 buttons to set the amount of lives and time the game will start with. If you are the last person standing or have the most lives once the timer runs out, you win the round and the LCD display will show that. We plan on making this battery powered, with the batteries located on the vest. In order to sync the players, we are planning to use WiFi.

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

Project Videos