RoPal

Inspiration

The American Psychological Association, in 2022 said that stress levels are at alarming rates due to the war between Russia and Ukraine, Covid-19, and increasing prices. Chronic stress directly contributes to psychological, and physiological disorders and affects almost every system in the body. Therefore, it is important to address stress and how to overcome it.

What it does

The history of Aromatherapy began about 3500 years ago. It involves the usage of essential oils to stimulate the olfactory system of the body and ultimately cause a response from the body. RoPal is your friend at work that would find you at your desk and sprays essential oils to alleviate stress based on emotion recognition through the facial reaction coming from the integrated webcam of the PC or the laptop camera.

How we built it

An ESP 32 camera module mounted on the head aids in finding the stressed employee. Using DL we built an emotion detector with a pre-trained mobile-net model that will continuously monitor the facial reactions of employees through the integrated webcam. If any facial reaction persists longer than 20 seconds, it will send the pulse to the microcontroller( Arduino)which would drive RoPal to track down the stressed employee. It has a 4-DoF arm, which uses a servo motor for actions to destress the employee.

Challenges we ran into

Detecting the facial reaction and integrating it with the hardware through wireless communication involved immense debugging. We had to limit ourselves to the components that are available in the inventory.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to build a partially working prototype of our project despite the availability constraints of the components. The dearth of certain components gave us a chance to learn and work with what is available which shows the flexibility of the team and our abilities to learn fast.

What we learned

We performed extensive research on aromatherapy. The task aided us to improve the facial recognition model. It taught us how to delegate jobs amongst team members and be effective team player. It also showed us the importance of time management while building a project.

What's next for RoPal

Improving the accuracy of the facial recognition model. Using tools like ROS 2 and Gazebo, analyze and autonomously map its environment, integrate additional tasks.