Hand Gesture Controlled Omnidirectional Vehicle

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this project was to study how hand gesture control can be implemented on a vehicle that utilizes mecanum wheels in order to move in all directions. Furthermore, it was investigated how the steering of such a vehicle can be made wireless to increase mobility. A prototype vehicle consisting of four mecanum wheels was constructed. Mecanum wheels are such wheels that enable translation in all directions. By varying rotational direction of each wheel, the direction of the resulting force on the vehicle is altered, making it move in the desired direction. Hand gesture control was enabled by constructing another prototype, attached to the hand, consisting of an IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) and a transceiver. With the IMU, the hand’s angle against the horizontal plane can be calculated and instructions can be sent over to the vehicle by making use of the transceiver. Those instructions contain a short message that specifies in what direction the vehicle should move. The vehicle rotates the wheels in the desired direction and move thereafter. The results show that wireless hand gesture based control of an omnidirectional vehicle works without any noticeable delay in the transmission and the signals that are sent contain the correct information about moving directions.