The Boomers

Inspiration

Traditional marketing—handing out pamphlets or vying for customer attention—can be exhausting, repetitive, and often ineffective. Authentic engagement happens when something truly unique captivates an audience.

What it does

That’s where our robot comes in—a game-changer that turns heads, sparks curiosity, and delivers messages in a way no one forgets. Innovation meets impact, redefining the future of advertising.

How we built it

First, we assembled the BoomBot using a Raspberry Pi kit and familiarized ourselves with its functionalities by following the step-by-step documentation. We then developed a program to enable the robot to identify and engage with potential customers autonomously. Our approach began with detecting human presence through a set of trackable nodes. Once a human was identified, we implemented code to guide the robot in tracking and approaching them while dynamically avoiding obstacles. Upon reaching the target, the robot was programmed to halt and play a pre-set advertisement, effectively delivering the intended message.

Challenges we ran into

Initially, we attempted to work through the project step by step as a team. However, we soon realized that a divide-and-conquer approach would be more efficient. By specializing in smaller sections, we became experts in our respective areas and shared our insights, ensuring everyone remained involved in the overall development process.

Throughout this journey, we encountered several challenges. Debugging was a constant hurdle, with connection resets, timeout errors, and frequent battery depletion disrupting our progress. The lack of comprehensive documentation for Pose Detection required extensive testing and fine-tuning of parameters. Additionally, we had to adapt to using our computer’s terminal, transition to VSCode, and establish a workflow that allowed multiple team members to collaborate seamlessly. We worked on copies of the original files to avoid conflicts, ensuring stability across our implementations. Finally, achieving precision in the robot’s movement required careful calibration, allowing it to take the optimal path to the identified human while effectively delivering the advertisement.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We learned how to use Raspberry Pi and what it is capable of, and we were surprised to what extent it can do so. Another is being able to account for errors due to the physical limitations of our hardware and environment, such as dust that has accumulated on the wheels or different power that is supplied to the motors, for which we accounted with modifications to our code and misalignments of our servos to accounting for mishaps during assembly in our code, combining hardware and software. We all came in thinking we were inexperienced compared to other teams; however, after working together, we have learned to trust each other and have progressed a long way to producing this final product we are proud of!

What we learned

Through our challenges and accomplishments, we learned that we should never doubt ourselves when stepping into a new adventure; we should take it on with optimism and an open mind to learn and absorb all that we can, as the task doesn't seem so overwhelming now that we have done it. We are now equipped with new tools in our toolkit that enable us to work on more significant projects later and further explore the possibility of adding more functionality to our product.

What's next for The Boomers

As the Boomers, we have become the Dreamers, dreaming of all the possibilities we had in mind but not enough time to test or explore during the hackathon's limits. We are excited to explore the future testing of functionalities like going from detecting a single human presence to being able to detect a crowd, and exploring the possibility of a bigger boombox to relay advertisements louder and effectively catch the audience's attention.