Gesture Control Robotic Car with Object placing Robotic Arm

Robotic vehicle movement and Arms control through hand gestures using Arduino is an assistive robot system for user-friendly support, hospital operations, and hazardous environment and increase the autonomy of physically impaired people. It is a kind of functional replacement hand integrated with th

Project Title

Gesture Control Robotic Car with Object placing Robotic Arm

Project Area of Specialization

Robotics

Project Summary

Robotic vehicle movement and Arms control through hand gestures using Arduino is an assistive robot system for user-friendly support, hospital operations, and hazardous environment and increase the autonomy of physically impaired people. It is a kind of functional replacement hand integrated with the moving vehicle that aids amputees who often suffers from physical difficulties. The prime aim of this system is to make it feasible to interact with the robot through the recognition of hand gestures for physically challenged people. This is an electromechanical system in which the robotic arm can be controlled by a simple inertial navigation sensor called an accelerometer. Similarly, the soft catching gripper connected to the robotic arm can be controlled by a flex sensor. The gesture commands measured by the accelerometer and flex sensor are processed by the Arduino controller. The Arduino controller is used in both the transmitter and receiver circuits, it responds based on the input given through the hand gestures. The signals get transmitted and received by an advanced wireless nRF communication system. The robotic vehicle can move in all possible four directions (forward, backward, right and left). The different operations performed by the robotic arm are picking and placing the objects from one location to another location. For the controlling of the motor, motor driver IC and Arduino controller is used. This system provides more natural and convenient ways to express their intentions and interactions with the environment.

dangerous, tricky and highly repetitive task and it also reduces human presence. Robotic operations are tremendously increased and have been widely accepted by many countries due to their error-free functioning. Apart from industries, robots offer the best solutions for designing a home automation system for elderly people and a support system for physically impaired people.
Gesture recognition is a highly adaptive interface between the robots and users. It allows the operations of complex machines using hand movement thereby eliminating physical contact. The gesture-controlled robots provide an opportunity to integrate disabled people into their normal working life as well as to increase their autonomy in activities of daily living. This kind of control could offer a practical way to give disabled people more independence. They can even help to meet challenges posed by military and defence operations. They can also be used in surgical operations. Under some circumstances, surgeons were unable to perform operations on time, which could be fatal in many cases and shifting patients becomes impractical. This system can explore the remote robot in a diverse environment utilizing different motion orders.

Project Objectives

The main objective is to develop a hand gesture-based robotic vehicle with an end effector to pick and place objects controlled by nRF communication to increase the autonomy of physically impaired people by using MEMS technology. This is an attractive and compact embedded device with sensors to sense the activities of human hands and to capture motion information from accelerations in a form of analogue voltage. This approach is focusing primarily on the task of grasping objects of different shapes and not that of manipulating or assembling objects. This type of grasping device has a variety of applications in object retrieval systems for the handicapped, planetary, underwater exploration and robotic surgery.
Also, to control the displacement of the robotic arm so that the arm can be used to pick and place objects from any source to destination.

Two separate accelerometers can control the robotic platform and the robotic arm. One accelerometer is mounted on the human hand and another one is mounted on the leg of the user capturing its gestures and postures. Thus the robotic arm and the platform move accordingly. The motions performed by the platform are forward, backward, right & left and the operations performed by the robotic arm are pick & place/ drop, raising and lowering the objects. The RF Module is used to transmit the different hand and leg gestures made by the user. The system is also equipped with an IP based camera which can stream real-time video wirelessly to any Internet-enabled device such as a Mobile phone, Laptop, Tablet etc. The biggest advantage of this kind of robotic arm is that it can work in hazardous areas and also in areas which cannot be accessed by humans and is also be used to implement highly precise medical treatments.

Project Implementation Method

TRANSMITTING END
The transmitter section consists of Arduino Uno Rev3 SMD, 3-axis accelerometer (ADXL 335), flex sensor, push-button switches and nRF24L01 with a 2.4GHz transmitter module. A separate 5-volt power supply which may be a battery source or through a laptop or pc is applied to the Arduino controller. The Arduino Uno, flex sensor, push-button switches and transmitter module receives a 5V power supply. Accelerometer takes 5V supply but a voltage regulator is inbuilt on the sensor which regulates power supply to 3.3V.

Accelerometer
ADXL 335 is a small, thin, low power, complete 3-axis accelerometer with signal conditioned outputs. It has 6 pins namely power supply (VCC), ground (GND), self-test (ST) and the remaining 3 pins are for the X, Y, and Z-axis. By tilting an accelerometer along its measured axis, one can read the gravitational force relative to the amount of tilt. The accelerometer can measure the force applied to the sensor in all the 3 directions X, Y and Z-axis. The sensor provides three values X, Y and Z which are calibrated for the four types of movement and a stopped position at the centre by use of the error values in the axis directions

Flex Sensor
The flex sensor is also known as a variable resistor but the resistance changes according to the bending i.e. flexing. It detects the bending movements and can be made unidirectional or bidirectional. It works on the principle of change of resistance. A flex sensor is basically a strip of carbon material having metal pads inside it which measure the amount of deflection caused by bending the sensor. Internally it consists of a carbon resistive element with a thin substrate

Arduino Uno SMD
The Arduino Uno SMD is a version of Arduino Uno but uses a surface-mount version of the Atmega328P rather than the through-hole version. The board has 14 digital input/output pins (of which 6 can be used as PWM outputs), 6 analogue inputs, a 16 MHz crystal oscillator, a USB connection, a power jack, and an ICSP header, and a reset button. Connect it to the computer with a USB cable or power it with an AC to DC adapter or battery to get started with the Arduino board.

Robotic Arm
The robotic arm is the type of mechanical arm which is fixed to the receiver part of the circuit; the control signal comes from the Arduino output based on the gesture input given in the transmitter part by using an accelerometer sensor. The robotic arm can rotate about the axis of 360 degrees, which is fixed to one of the DC geared motors. The rotational control and the movement of the arm are based on the gesture input that is given from the transmitter section. One part of the hand is about 20 cm and another part of the arm (elbow part) is 30 cm long. A certain load is applied at the end of the arm for lifting the objects of desired weight. The servo motor is used for the purpose of gripping and placing the objects because the servo motor is used for the low torque application

Benefits of the Project

A robotic vehicle controlled by hand movement mainly benefits the disabled person, as that person with the hand gesture moves to the direction they want to go without pressing any buttons.
This system includes a glove which has a receiver circuit which will be mounted on the top with an Atmega microcontroller interfaced to the accelerometer and it is supposed to be worn by the user while using this machine. The circuit on the vehicle includes an FR receiver, PIC microcontroller and Driver IC to operate the motors. The commands that are received by the IC on the circuit are sent to the RF transmitter which forwards the command to the RF receiver. The command from the RF receiver then gets transmitted to the PIC microcontroller which decodes the command and makes the vehicle move in the direction specified by the user.

Technical Details of Final Deliverable

Experiments were done mainly in two parts. In the first part, we tested the transmitter module separately by connecting the Arduino controller to the PC/Laptop and observed the output for different movements of the accelerometer and bending of the flex sensor in the Arduino software (IDE). In the second phase, we tested the receiver module by giving inputs from the transmitter and successfully observed the displacement of the robotic arm, opening & closing of grippers and then the movements of the robotic platform in all possible four directions. The observation that has been made, clearly shows that the movement of the robot is precise, accurate, very easy to control and moreover user friendly to use. The performance of the robotic arm and robotic vehicle was checked using different hand movements. The robotic arm design is very simple and has the ability to grasp lightweight objects and also mimic hand gestures almost flawlessly. This robotic arm can perform complex and hazardous operations with ease. Thus the assistive or supportive robot system was assessed positively in the subjective evaluation. The participants subjectively perceived the hand gesture performance as easy i.e. robotic vehicle movements, robotic arm motions and opening and closing of grippers. This can be well suited for pick and place operations. Using this framework, a non-expert robot programmer can control the robot quickly in a natural way.

Final Deliverable of the Project

Hardware System

Core Industry

Manufacturing

Other Industries

Core Technology

Robotics

Other Technologies

Sustainable Development Goals

Decent Work and Economic Growth, Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure, Responsible Consumption and Production

Required Resources

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