Meeting with Your TA

Description

By the Thursday of the third week, you must have a project approved, and should be ready to get working! At this time, you'll need to log into PACE and submit your schedule for the semester. Please be sure to make this as accurate as possible because once it's submitted, it can only be changed manually. Making a block of your schedule red means that you are unavailable during that time.

Once each person on your team has submitted their schedule, your TA will be able to easily check for available times to schedule a weekly meeting. Your TA should contact you, usually by the fourth week, via email, to set up a weekly meeting schedule at mutual convenience. During the first weekly meeting, your TA will assign your team a locker and a lab kit.

Weekly meetings with your TA are required and will be held throughout the entire semester until demonstrations are completed. Your TA is your project manager. The "homework" of the course consists of preparing for the weekly meetings. Your TA will evaluate your lab notebook each week, provide feedback, and recommend improvements. At each meeting you will be expected to present your progress since your last meeting, plans for the coming week, and any technical or administrative questions you need to discuss with your TA. You are expected to arrive on time and prepared to make good use of your time with your TA. Your TA may require that each team member to fill out the Progress Report Template and submit it to them prior to each weekly meeting.

Requirements and Grading

Attendance and participation in weekly meetings is required and will affect Teamwork and Lab Notebook scores. If you can't make it to a particular weekly meeting, it is your responsibility to inform your TA prior to the meeting time and set up an alternate time.

Submission and Deadlines

Your schedule must be submitted by the end of the third week of class and you will receive an email from your TA shortly after. Your first meeting with your TA should be during the fourth week of the semester.

Remotely Controlled Self-balancing Mini Bike

Will Chen, Eric Tang, Jiaming Xu

Featured Project

# Remotely Controlled Self-balancing Mini Bike

Team Members:

- Will Chen hongyuc5

- Jiaming Xu jx30

- Eric Tang leweit2

# Problem

Bike Share and scooter share have become more popular all over the world these years. This mode of travel is gradually gaining recognition and support. Champaign also has a company that provides this service called Veo. Short-distance traveling with shared bikes between school buildings and bus stops is convenient. However, since they will be randomly parked around the entire city when we need to use them, we often need to look for where the bike is parked and walk to the bike's location. Some of the potential solutions are not ideal, for example: collecting and redistributing all of the bikes once in a while is going to be costly and inefficient; using enough bikes to saturate the region is also very cost inefficient.

# Solution

We think the best way to solve the above problem is to create a self-balancing and moving bike, which users can call bikes to self-drive to their location. To make this solution possible we first need to design a bike that can self-balance. After that, we will add a remote control feature to control the bike movement. Considering the possibilities for demonstration are complicated for a real bike, we will design a scaled-down mini bicycle to apply our self-balancing and remote control functions.

# Solution Components

## Subsystem 1: Self-balancing part

The self-balancing subsystem is the most important component of this project: it will use one reaction wheel with a Brushless DC motor to balance the bike based on reading from the accelerometer.

MPU-6050 Accelerometer gyroscope sensor: it will measure the velocity, acceleration, orientation, and displacement of the object it attaches to, and, with this information, we could implement the corresponding control algorithm on the reaction wheel to balance the bike.

Brushless DC motor: it will be used to rotate the reaction wheel. BLDC motors tend to have better efficiency and speed control than other motors.

Reaction wheel: we will design the reaction wheel by ourselves in Solidworks, and ask the ECE machine shop to help us machine the metal part.

Battery: it will be used to power the BLDC motor for the reaction wheel, the stepper motor for steering, and another BLDC motor for movement. We are considering using an 11.1 Volt LiPo battery.

Processor: we will use STM32F103C8T6 as the brain for this project to complete the application of control algorithms and the coordination between various subsystems.

## Subsystem 2: Bike movement, steering, and remote control

This subsystem will accomplish bike movement and steering with remote control.

Servo motor for movement: it will be used to rotate one of the wheels to achieve bike movement. Servo motors tend to have better efficiency and speed control than other motors.

Stepper motor for steering: in general, stepper motors have better precision and provide higher torque at low speeds than other motors, which makes them perfect for steering the handlebar.

ESP32 2.4GHz Dual-Core WiFi Bluetooth Processor: it has both WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity so it could be used for receiving messages from remote controllers such as Xbox controllers or mobile phones.

## Subsystem 3: Bike structure design

We plan to design the bike frame structure with Solidworks and have it printed out with a 3D printer. At least one of our team members has previous experience in Solidworks and 3D printing, and we have access to a 3D printer.

3D Printed parts: we plan to use PETG material to print all the bike structure parts. PETG is known to be stronger, more durable, and more heat resistant than PLA.

PCB: The PCB will contain several parts mentioned above such as ESP32, MPU6050, STM32, motor driver chips, and other electronic components

## Bonus Subsystem4: Collision check and obstacle avoidance

To detect the obstacles, we are considering using ultrasonic sensors HC-SR04

or cameras such as the OV7725 Camera function with stm32 with an obstacle detection algorithm. Based on the messages received from these sensors, the bicycle could turn left or right to avoid.

# Criterion For Success

The bike could be self-balanced.

The bike could recover from small external disturbances and maintain self-balancing.

The bike movement and steering could be remotely controlled by the user.

Project Videos