spACE Ranger

Inspiration

We were inspired by the mars rover, and the space cowboy aesthetic of Cowboy Bebop. We combined these ideas into a neofuturistic space cowboy robot.

What it does

The robot can move autonomously, and operate a robotic arm using motion controls. We track the position of your hand in real time. Ranching space cattle and wrangling asteroids is as easy as picking up a coffee cup.

How we built it

We used a leap motion to track hands, a customized Arduino as a wireless joystick, and a raspberry pi connected to a rover to operate the motors. Each component operates independently, communicating over a network in a microservice architecture.

Challenges we ran into

We attempted to make a motor driver for the tank tread motors using discrete components, but we couldn't get logic-level voltage for them to work correctly. Following that, we tried to use bjt's instead and got it halfway working, but it wasn't allowing the motors to run with enough power, so unfortunately, we had to scrap the idea and ended up using our backup motor drivers.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting gesture recognition working with the leap motion was very difficult but extremely satisfying. Originally, the lab we borrowed the components from had not been able to do anything with the robot, so we are the first to get a project working on it.

What we learned

We learned how to do basic inverse kinematics to map the 3D position of a hand to the joint rotations of the robotic arm.

What's next for spACE Ranger

We plan to take what we learned and use it in the Autonomous Control and Engineering lab that we borrowed the parts from.

Built With

• arduino
• leap-motion
• python
• raspberry-pi
• robotics
• ros2