Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
38 Automatic Ball Borrowing System
 Jingyang Liu
Qihao Wang
Yang Xiao
 Mickey Zhang design_document0.pdf
design_document0.pdf
final_paper0.pdf
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other0.pdf
proposal0.pdf
At the ARC of our school, we can only borrow basketballs or other balls from staff. As a result, we want to build a machine to dispense those balls. By scanning their IDs, students can get those balls from the machine. Also, they can return the balls to the machine by putting back the balls and scanning their IDs again.
We use a RFID as students' ID and we have two buttons which are “borrow” and “return”. In the machine, we put balls in a channel. The ball comes out at the beginning of the channel and people return balls at the end of the channel. At the bottom of channel, there are pressure sensors to measure the weight of balls. As a result, we can know whether students return the ball or not. We will use LCD to display the remaining number of balls inside the channel. We will put a motor in the machine to push the ball out of the machine. The channel has a slope at the exit to prevent the balls from leaving the channel. In addition, there will be an IR sensor at the exit. If the sensor detects the ball, the motor will stop to make sure that exactly one ball will leave the channel. If a person returns other things instead of balls, the pressure sensor will detect it and turn on the alarm.
For our project, we adjust our scalability that we build a machine that takes golf balls or baseballs. However, we can apply our machine to take basketballs in real life in the future.

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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