May the Drone be with You
May the Drones be with You is a team project with the objective to create a hand-controlled drone. Like the force featured in the popular film franchise, Star Wars, this project will be able to read the user’s hand movements and signal the drone to move in the way parallel to how the hand moves. This project was hosted under the Build18 event, operated by Carnegie Mellon University. Our team consisted of one Electrical and Computer Engineering major, two Computer Science majors, one Mechanical Engineering Major, and finally myself, a Fine Arts major. We discussed how it would be cool if the hand-maneuvered drone could be easily transportable, so the team was split into two groups, one who focused on the hand-controlled drone and another who’ll design and build a landing dock / container for the drone.
(2023)
Grace and I looking over the sketches and discussing the design and logistic of the landing pad.
Sketches of the container, or what we call, The Egg, and its different iterations.
The lowest compartment held the Arduino that was connected to a Bluetooth module that will signal the servo motors to open the hatch.
Side profile of the container. The top level is the landing dock, the second level is an open space for where the hatch would go in when opening.
The drone resting on its comfy landing platform.
How does it work?
We have a camera that detects the area of a selected certain color, in this video’s case, the blue ball. The larger the blue ball gets, the larger the surface area gets, therefore indicating that the ball is coming closer. The opposite applies for when the ball gets farther. The position of the ball is also recognized through the camera as well. Using these indicators, the balls coordinates are constantly recorded. When the coordinates indicate that the ball is moving to a certain direction, the program tells the drone to speed up in that direction by how ever much the coordinate changed.