Welcome to Project Hardis!

This page will briefly explain our project, the goals we hope to reach, and the way we intend to reach them.

The team

We are three students from UCSD, enrolled in professor Ryan Kastner’s CSE 145 class.

Guillaume HAUSS (French – EE major)
Tony FUGAZZOTTO (Italian – CE major)
Yuming QUIAO (Chinese – CE major)
This course is focused on teamwork, engineering projects and technical speaking. We came up with our own idea of project, and have ten weeks to realize it.

The project

We want to make your hands even more powerful than they are right now. The question you must be asking yourself is certainly why? and how?
The fact is that our hands are useless if we don’t have the tools we need, to do what we want to do. And sometimes havind these tools are quite difficult. Want playing the piano in a plane ? Go and show me! Want to pilot a drone without a controller? Go ahead!
This answer the why question.

Now how is that possible?

We’re going to use two technologies
LeapMotion module for hands tracking
Socket.io for wireless communication

LeapMotion (www.leapmotion.com) is a high-tech firm which has created a little module, USB plugged to your computer, that allows you to play in a 3D virtual world with your hands. They are using infrared LEDS to track motions and gestures and render them in a 3D virtual environment. It’s pretty awesome! All the code is opensource, and the APIs are fully detailed! Everyone can build his own application!

Socket.io (www.socket.io) is a communication protocol, used to send messages on a local server. It’s basically a capsule, that can contains any kind of data. We will be sending JSON files (text files) through this channel!

But where are we going to send the messages?
That’s the final part of our project. We are working with an OpenROV (www.openrov.com). This is an open-source world-wide engineering project whose goal is to create and design the cheapest, most modular and easy to build drone.

However
This is not the only field of applications! Think of paralized people in their bed. A single move of their hand and a personal robotic help will come and assist him/her in any possible way.

Technical Specifications

Our project lasts 10 weeks, that’s awfully short! Therefore, we decided to focus on reachable goals, and that means using all the work the LeapMotion can do for us.
Indeed, the API provides lots of tracking tools and data from the hand tracking (pitch, roll and yaw angles of the hand for example). And what does the OpenROV need to move underwater? Pitch, Roll and Yaw angles! A translating step will be needed if the output and input ranges do not match.
Concerning the thrusters, we will use the grasping strength provided by the LeapMotion. A fist means stop, an flat palm means move forward! Keep it simple!

The Schedule

We assigned one milestone by person by week. This is the schedule we came up with.