Single-Equipment with Multiple-Application for an Automated Robot-Car Control System

• Main Authors: Saleem Ullah, Zain Mumtaz, Shuo Liu, Mohammad Abubaqr, Athar Mahboob, Hamza Ahmad Madni
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2019-02-01
• Series: Sensors
• Subjects: android; arduino; bluetooth; hand-gesture recognition; low cost; open source; sensors; smart cars; speech recognition
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/19/3/662

The integration of greater functionalities into vehicles increases the complexity of car-controlling. Many research efforts are dedicated to designing car-controlling systems that allow users to instruct the car just to show it what it should do; however, for non-expert users, controlling the car with a remote or a switch is complicated. So, keeping this in mind, this paper presents an Arduino based car-controlling system that no longer requires manual control of the cars. Two main contributions are presented in this work. Firstly, we show that the car can be controlled with hand-gestures, according to the movement and position of the hand. The hand-gesture system works with an Arduino Nano, accelerometer, and radio-frequency (RF) transmitter. The accelerometer (attached with the hand-glove) senses the acceleration forces that are produced by the hand movement, and it will transfer the data to the Arduino Nano that is placed on hand glove. After receiving the data, Arduino Nano will convert it into different angle values in ranges of 0⁻450° and send the data to the RF receiver of the Arduino Uno, which is placed on the car through the RF transmitter. Secondly, the proposed car system is to be controlled by an android based mobile-application with different modes (e.g., touch buttons mode, voice recognition mode). The mobile-application system is the extension of the hand-gesture system with the addition of Bluetooth module. In this case, whenever the user presses any of the touch buttons in the application, and/or gives voice commands, the corresponding signal is sent to the Arduino Uno. After receiving the signal, Arduino will check this against its predefined instructions for moving forward, backward, left, right, and brake; then it will send the command to the motor module to move the car in the corresponding direction. In addition, an automatic obstacle detection system is introduced to improve the safety measurements to avoid any hazards with the help of sensors placed at the front of the car. The proposed systems are designed as a lab-scale prototype to experimentally validate the efficiency, accuracy, and affordability of the systems. The experimental results prove that the proposed work has all in one capability (hand-gesture, touch buttons and voice-recognition with mobile-application, obstacle detection), is very easy to use, and can be easily assembled in a simple hardware circuit. We remark that the proposed systems can be implemented under real conditions at large-scale in the future, which will be useful in automobiles and robotics applications.