As you may have seen in Nav’s post, we are working together for our final project. After a short discussion, we came to the conclusion that we had more to gain from merging our projects into a more complex, but also more interesting final project for Intro to IM.
The main idea is to have a space ship that will be moved around a play area by the user. This spaceship would essentially be a mounted on a little robot which would move around according to the movements of the player. The spaceship would interact with this play area and follow a certain storyline that we come up with. The storyline is space based, we still have to think it through. We will use the laptop’s webcam and machine learning to use some hand gestures to direct movement.
Nav came up with this diagram which I will use in my post too.
We will need:
2 Laptops. 1 runs the spaceship, the other runs the play area – refer diagram above.
SpaceShip – Lego spaceship that will move around and interact with the play area.
Runs on Arduino code if processing cannot connect to XBee
Items – 1 Arduino, Acrylic sheets, 2 Motors, Motor Shield, 2 Wheels – choose the right ones, XBee shield on it for reception of commands
Play Area (space) Contains sensors that detect the presence of spaceship
Items – 1 Very large cardboard piece, 1 Arduino, Sensors (depending on number of bases), Black paint/cloth
Human Interaction Controls the movement of spaceship
StoryLine Gives a purpose to the movement of spaceship in the play area and makes it more interactive
The hardest part will definitely be figuring out the communication with XBee, building a robot with a sustainable power source that we can move around and finalise the design before the 14th, time constraints are the hardest part of the assignment, for sure.