3D Scan/Kinect Makerbot/Howard Community College/Spring2012/p21550Kinect Robotic Car

Problem Statement

Use Arduino and kinect's gesture feature to create a robotic RC car.

Team Members

Mir07

Eshipley

Summary

Initially we agreed to use RC Car in the lab, However that required pulling apart a brand new RC toy so we decided to calibrate controller with another toy car that had the same frequency. The we decided to use kinect-gesture features and the arduino to send information to the controller.

Poster

Robotic_Car

Story

The Main idea of this project was to hook up kinect and arduino with an RC car, then move it using kinect gestures. The kinect, using serial communication would be able to communicate with the arduino and the arduino then converts that data from the kinect gestures to the RC controller which then moves the RC car. The Project was split up between two team members; one of the members was responsible for software part which would deal with the kinect, processing all the gesture based information using c# or python language, then using processing the kinect gesture information would be translated into the arduino which would pass on the parameters to the RC controller to move the car. The other team member was responsible for actually hacking the RC controller and matching its frequency with a RC car.

Decision List

I. Robotic Car

   1) How does it work?
        A) Hardware
           -kinect
           -RC Car and hackecd RC Controller
        B) Software- To convert kinect gestures data to arduino data
             - http://files.ch9.ms/coding4fun/KinectForWindowsSDKQuickstarts.zip   -http://codingfun.collinboy.net/ 

   2) What else might be needed?
      A) Equipment to check the controller’s polarity

Material List

Nothing Needs to be purchased for this project, the code and kinect software can be downloaded online from http://channel9.msdn.com/

1. RC Controller

2. RC Car

3. Kinect

Software List

There is no Actual software but some code is required that can be downloaded from

1) http://channel9.msdn.com/

2) kinect Drivers can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/kinectforwindows/

Time

17 Hours

Tutorials

All projects create new tutorials of technical details future participants are going to want to know. They are going to be separate pages that are linked to here.

Next Steps

The software part of this project is complete, even the wiring with the arduino and kinect is complete. The only part which was not completed was the RC controller hack. This project can be completed if the RC controller can be calibrated with the RC car and the arduino.