Hands-Free Drone

Inspiration

Our interests in robotics and physics led us to create a sensor that allows the user to fly a drone without the remote control. We found the idea to create this sensor from instructables.com and decided to take it further.

What it does

The sensor we built uses the human body's capacitance to produce a signal to 3 metal plates and send a command to a drone to fly it.

How we built it

We built our sensor using cardboard, aluminum foil, and an Arduino to read the fluctuations in current as the user's hand moves with in the sensor's space. We processed the serial outputs of the Arduino to determine the user's hand position and visualized it using Processing. We interfaced with the Tello drone using Node.js, Python and Scratch to send commands to the drone.

Challenges we ran into

The construction of the sensor was very difficult as it had a very specific configuration of wires and needed shielded audio cable wires to reduce the amount of magnetic interference it produced. Due to these limitations, our sensor was very sensitive to the position of its wires and any capacitive object it in its vicinity. A major challenge we encountered was the interface between Arduino and Scratch. We were able to use Python to read the Arduino's serial outputs and trigger keyboard events to execute functions in Scratch 2.0.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Were are very proud of what we have created due to us overcoming the many challenges that we have faced during this project. We were able to create a fully functioning apparatus using a multitude of APIs and IDEs that rarely function together.