Jeremy S.

My name is Jeremy, and I am a rising senior at The Masters School. For my main project, I chose the Gesture Controlled Robot With Robotic Arm. I chose this project because I have had a little experience with robotics in the past and I wanted to try it in a more intensive and individual setting to see if it’s something I’m really passionate about. The robot and the arm attached to it are controlled by a glove that you wear on your hand. The different motions that control the robot, such as bending a finger or making a fist, can be customized as well as their functions. I chose the voice changer for my starter project, which uses a microphone and a speaker to alter your voice as you speak into it to change the pitch, make it robotic, or make it vibrato.

I think that Bluestamp was a great experience for me as an engineer. Not only did I gain the skills of coding, CAD design, and circuitry, but I also learned how to work independently and problem solve. It was a great feeling when my project finally worked, and it made me want to continue building and designing in the future. Figuring out why it wasn’t working took a lot of patience and persistence that I didn’t know I was capable of. I am very excited to continue pursuing engineering in college and beyond.

Engineer

Jeremy S

Area of Interest

Electrical Engineering

School

The Masters School

Grade

Incoming Senior

Final Project

My intensive project is the gesture controlled robot. I started by making the glove. I sowed the four flex sensors onto the fingers of the glove and attached them to an arduino. I also attached an nrf chip to the arduino, which makes a wireless connection with another nrf on the robot. For the robot, I designed the chassie using CAD and 3D printed it. I then attached the two motors with wheels on them to either side and two smaller wheels to the back. Next, I put together the arm with the three servos in it with the claw at the top snd glued it to the chassie. Finally, I created two codes, one for the glove and one for the robot, that utilize the nrf’s to communicate the values of the flex sensors and turn them into commands for the robot.

For my final milestone I used nrf’s to make the flex sensors on my glove able to control the motors on my chassis. I originally planned to use Xbee’s instead of the nrf’s, but they were not working properly so I decided to switch. There is one nrf connected to each arduino, and they use radio to communicate with each other. The nrf on the glove, or the transmitter, reads the flex sensor values and sends it to the nrf on the robot, or the receiver. The receiver then gives commands to the different parts of the robot based on the values. Getting the correct code for the nrf’s took many tries because it was hard to see exactly what was causing them to not receive the correct values. I also had to rewire my entire chassis because the xbee shield broke and I could not upload code. I ended up putting a new arduino on my robot and replacing the motors with more powerful ones for better movement. There are four commands that I can do with my glove; making a fist makes the robot move forwards and bending just my thumb makes it move backwards, bending my thumb and my forefinger rotates the claw, and bending my thumb, middle, and ring fingers opens and closes the claw.

My code on Github

My CAD Design:

gesture-controlled-robot-2.stl_

My Bill of Materials

jeremy-bill-of-materials

Glove Circuit Diagram

Robot Circuit Diagram

Second Milestone

For my second milestone, I assembled the robot arm and the motors on my 3D printed chassis. I also used code to get 2 out of 3 servos in the arm and the motors with wheels attached to them moving simultaneously. The motors are attached to an H-bridge, which supplies power to them from the arduino board. The two servos that work control different movements of the arm, and the third one will open and close the claw at the end. Eventually, different motions made by my glove will control the different motors and servos on the chassis.

First Milestone

For my first milestone I sewed the flex sensors onto my glove, connected the sensors to my arduino, and wrote a code that can read whether or not the sensors are bent. The flex sensors are also connected to a breadboard that has a resistor for each sensor, an LED, and a button. The button will control whether the flex sensors are controlling the car or the claw on the robot, with the LED being on for the claw and off for the car. There is an Xbee on the arduino (the router) that will communicate with another Xbee on the robot (the coordinator) and send the commands to be executed. In my code, the value for the unbent flex sensors is 90 and it goes down when the sensors are bent.

Starter Project

My starter project is the voice changer, which alters your voice as you speak into it. It contains a variety of parts, including resistors, capacitors, LED’s, and trimmers, that had to be soldered to a PCB. The resistors control the amount of current going through so too much doesn’t get to the other parts. The capacitors store electrical energy like a battery. The trimmers act as potentiometers, which are adjustable resistors that control the volume and microphone sensitivity. When a switch is flipped to turn it on, you can speak into the microphone and use the four different buttons to make your voice higher pitched, lower pitched, robotic, or vibrato. It alters voices by using granular synthesis, which is a technique of joining and layering lots of very short audio loops to build up more complex sounds or instruments. Pitch shifts are achieved by compressing or stretching the audio loops.