Design and development of a four - wheel educational robot remote controlled by tablet

• Main Author: Li, Xiao Tong
• Other Authors: Chen I-Ming
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2015
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering; DRNTU::Engineering::Mechanical engineering::Mechatronics
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/63987
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This final year project aims to design and develop a remote controlled four-wheel educa- tional robot for primary school student under the age of 12. By using Python as the main programming language and Raspberry Pi B+ as the micro controller, corresponding hardware and software design are implemented to get a functional robot that meets the demands of schools and parents. The robot has electrical hardware like speakers, camera, servomotors, Dynamixel AX- 12A motor and LED matrix. For mechanical fabrication, acrylic frame are laser-cutted and mounted on transparent chassis. Three layers of chassis are designed for neck base, controller fixation, circuit and motors mounting respectively. All the other gears, shafts and mounting hubs are special designed and ordered. The robot can be remote controlled by android tablet via Wi-Fi. A server program will automatically run after Raspberry Pi starts up. The server will receive and deal with different commands send from tablet or other devices. On the tablet GUI, there is one Control Panel for movements and emotions control, a Cam- era Panel with a webview for real-time camera pictures streaming to tablet and an Interactive Panel with music and story random play and gesture selection function. OpenCV is inte- grated into the project to recognize the gesture and calculate the number of selection. The same control application and configurations can also applied to other platforms like iOS on iPhone. Different control platforms can work simultaneously to perform different tasks like move forward and change direction controlled by iPhone while stream real-time pictures to tablet.