Ivar - The Search and Rescue Bot

Inspiration

We had really wanted to do a hardware hack and immediately started grabbing everything that we could. In the process, we thought about a maze idea when another participant talked about her maze generation project, and we instantly knew we had to make a maze bot.

What it does

Ivar will automatically searches through a maze for a goal target. Right now, it is programmed to essentially just find the exit of the maze. In addition, there is a gesture control module which will allow us to remotely control it if we so desired.

How we built it

We used an alphabot and arduino system with infared proximity sensors to emulate our bot. We then connected it via USB to a Qualcomm Dragonboard which recieves a signal from the Dell XPS of an action to perform or to function autonomously. We used C++ to build the Leap Motion system and the Arduino bot (along with Arduino IDE), and python to make the interface as well as connect over wifi.

Challenges we ran into

We had a lot of challenges with the Arduino-bot and Dragonboard especially since it kept rebooting without any kind of input from us. In addition, we had to develop our own battery pack to actually run the bot. In addition, we had issues with serial read/write from the bot.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we were able to make such a complex system with so many parts in this short time. Although, it is not perfect, the system is able to detect our hands and send it to the dragonboard along with the bot being able to function autonomously.