invisible hand

Inspiration

There are various scenarios in which using our own hands to move things around, is impossible but necessary. One of them, for example, in particle detectors, where the amount of radiation deems it impossible for a person to do maintenance on a detector without the uncomfortable/inconvenient radiation suit. Robotic arms controlled with joysticks are now being used in some places, but the manipulation of these is far from natural. Our idea was to create a prototype that would receive input from moving hands via a 3D motion sensor and output to a robot that would perform the task indicated by the hands.

What it does

How I built it

We created a c++ file that reads of from the 3D motion sensor, this outputs a 2 column x,y text file that indicates the position of the hands in a 2D plane parallel to the surface of the sensor. Parallel to this, we created code that controls the motion of the stepper motors.

Challenges I ran into

Serial ports not working.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We got it to create an output file from the information we wanted from the hand motion! We built a robot from scratch from very limited material! We coded the robot to draw!

What I learned

We learned that bouncing around crazy ideas that we probably didn't have time to develop was not a complete waste of time, since we got around to actually having one which we could work with. One of us learned about serial ports. We both brushed up on our c, c++ skills.

What's next for invisible hand

Ideally, we would get the arduino to receive the data directly from the motion sensor and then program a whole bunch of hand commands to control the robot.

Built With

• arduino
• c
• c++
• leap-motion
• stepper-motors