Improving the freshman electrical and computer engineering lab

This thesis covers the challenges of creating and maintaining an introductory engineering laboratory. The history of the University of Illinois Electrical and Computer Engineering department’s introductory course, ECE 110, is recounted. The current state of the course, as of Fall 2008, is discussed along with current challenges arising from the use of a hand-wired prototyping board with logic gates. A plan for overcoming these issues using a new microcontroller-based board with a pseudo hardware description language is discussed. The new microcontroller based system implementation is extensively detailed along with its new accompanying description language. This new system was tried in several sections of the Fall 2008 semester alongside the old system; the students’ final performances with the two different approaches are compared in terms of design, performance, complexity, and enjoyment. The system in its first run shows great promise, increasing the students’ enjoyment, and improving the performance of their designs.

Gait Regulation for Bipedal Locomotion

This work explores regulation of forward speed, step length, and slope walking for the passive-dynamic class of bipedal robots. Previously, an energy-shaping control for regulating forward speed has appeared in the literature; here we show that control to be a special case of a more general time-scaling control that allows for speed transitions in arbitrary time. As prior work has focused on potential energy shaping for fully actuated bipeds, we study in detail the shaping of kinetic energy for bipedal robots, giving special treatment to issues of underactuation. Drawing inspiration from features of human walking, an underactuated kinetic-shaping control is presented that provides efficient regulation of walking speed while adjusting step length. Previous results on energetic symmetries of bipedal walking are also extended, resulting in a control that allows regulation of speed and step length while walking on any slope. Finally we formalize the optimal gait regulation problem and propose a dynamic programming solution seeded with passive-dynamic limit cycles. Observations of the optimal solutions generated by this method reveal further similarities between passive dynamic walking and human locomotion and give insight into the structure of minimum-effort controls for walking.