Project Title: Gesture-Controlled Smart Rover for Assisted Mobility
Description:
Individuals with limited hand or arm dexterity often face significant barriers when using conventional joystick- or button-based mobility controls, which require a degree of fine motor precision that not every user can reliably sustain. This project presents the design, implementation, and hands-on testing of a low-cost gesture-controlled smart rover intended as an accessible navigation platform for individuals with limited upper-limb motor function. The system comprises a wearable Smart Glove transmitter built around an ESP32 microcontroller and an MPU6050 inertial measurement unit (IMU), paired with a four-wheeled rover receiver driven by an L298N dual H-bridge motor driver. Hand-tilt data is streamed to the rover over the ESP-NOW peer-to-peer wireless protocol, eliminating the latency and infrastructure requirements of conventional Wi-Fi or Bluetooth links. A threshold-based dead-zone filter suppresses unintended movement from residual hand tremor, and an automatic rollover-detection mechanism, also based on the MPU6050, identifies a tip-over event and triggers an SOS alert to notify the user or a caregiver. During hardware integration, a motor-induced voltage brownout was identified, diagnosed, and resolved through a high-discharge battery and a common-ground wiring strategy. Field testing on a physical prototype confirmed consistent directional control, a reliable fail-safe motor cutoff, and correct triggering of the rollover SOS alert, supporting the feasibility of IMU-based gesture interfaces as a practical and replicable alternative to joystick-based assistive mobility controls.
Uploaded At: 2026-06-23 07:12:37