Gesture controlled car using Arduino • Tech Projects

Who doesn’t love playing with RC cars and Robots. Not only playing, engineers and enthusiasts like us love to build and experiment with these stuffs. Also its fair to say that RC’s and Robots have became more than just toys, they already have started to integrate into our life slowly. But to take this to another standard we have built a Gesture controlled car using the most powerful development board Arduino. Let’s see how to build your own gesture controlled car.

MOTTO OF GESTURE CONTROLLED CAR:

To drive a toy car using our hand movements or gestures.

HARDWARE USED:

TRANSMITTER PART AND ROBOT:

Arduino Uno.
ADXL335 accelerometer.
434 MHz RF transmitter.
Breadboard.

RECEIVER PART AND ROBOT:

Arduino Uno.
434 MHz RF receiver.
L293D motor driver IC.
Chassis and wheels.
2 DC motors.
Breadboard.

SCHEMATIC DIAGRAM OF TRANSMITTER:

ADXL335:

This forms the basic constituent of our gesture controlled car. This basically is an Accelerometer which is capable of detecting acceleration in three axis X,Y and Z. The output of these three axis can be obtained separately from three pins x,y and z. This is shown in the above circuit diagram (I have used only X and Y axis for this project) . Read briefly about interfacing this sensor with Arduino here.

ARDUINO UNO:

The arduino board in the transmitter part acts as an interpreter. This fetches X and Y values from the accelerometer and then decides the gesture. There are five gestures or movements we have used in this project. By trail and error method we have recorded the X and Y values for the gestures, those are

Stop or No Movement – X-Value:331 to 339 & Y-Value:341 to 349
Tilt Forward or Forward movement – X-Value:376 to 384 & Y-Value:336 to 344
Tilt Backward or Backward Movement – X-Value:301 to 309 & Y-Value:351 to 359
Tilt Left or Left movement – X-Value:291 to 299 & Y-Value:276 to 284
Tilt Right or Right movement – X-Value:316 to 324 & Y-Value:386 to 394

Based on the above conditions the Arduino will decide the movement and send it to transmitter.