Grading Scheme :: ECE 445 - Senior Design Laboratory

Grading Scheme

 

The grading scheme for the course, as well as links to specific requirements for each assignment/deliverable and evaluation sheets, are given in the table below. Due dates for each assignment/deliverable can be found on the course Calendar. Please note:

Below is the points breakdown for all assignments/deliverables for the course, sorted chronologically:

Item Team / Individual Score Points Evaluation Sheet**
Project Selection Form Individual 5 None
Lab Notebook Individual 50 PDF
Weekly TA Meetings Team N/A None
Weekly Team Update Meeting Team 3/session None
Team Contract Team 5  
Project Proposal Team 25 PDF
PCB Design Exercise Individual 10 PDF
Soldering Exercise Individual 10 PDF
Design Document
Requirements and Verification
Team 40 PDF
Individual Progress Report Individual 25 PDF
Mock Demo Individual 5 None
Final Demo * Team 150 PDF
Final Presentation * Individual 50 PDF
Final Report: Technical Team 30 PDF
Final Report: English/Format Team 20 PDF
Peer Reviews (2 total) Individual 40 (total) None
Teamwork & Participation Individual 20 None

* Grades for these will be the average of the TA and Instructor grades; peer review grades will be used to provide feedback.
** Evaluation Sheets are subject to minor changes.

Dynamic Legged Robot

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