Joystick control car drive mechanism for physically challenged people

We often see that persons with a disability need to use mobility car. Mobility Car is a vehicle issued to a disabled person, to allow them to travel without the burden of their disability. Mobility cars are obtained from a scheme called "Motability". But this car too not come with some preconditions and these conditions are difficult to meet for severely disabled people. Moreover, driving a car is always difficult for a person with having control distributed all over.

This project is for engineering students and would be extremely useful for people who impair their physical abilities

Our objective:
We want to build a car that can be operated by using a joystick. If we can build that, it would be a great help for disabled persons.

Why we need this type of system?

The existing system in the market is modified to allow the physically disabled to drive but it still needs lots of improvements.


How to build one?

The Vehicle works in two modes:
1) Joystick:- A joystick is an input device consisting of a stick that pivots on a base and reports its angle or direction to the device it is controlling. We will take input from the user through a joystick and then process it to produce servo commands via an Arduino Board.
2) Autonomous driving in a constrained environment: Using input from the Kinect sensor. Kinect is a motion-sensing input device by Microsoft for the Xbox 360 video game console and Windows PCs to obtain depth image and process the frames in real-time. To perform depth-based blob detection combining it with vision-based blob tracking to perform a robust obstacle detection. The technique involves using a slice of depth image for detecting obstacles and then finding path taking in view the maximum steering angle, width of the vehicle, turning radius, etc.

System Requirements:
Languages Used: python 2.5, autonomous module is built in c#
Softwares: Aforge image processing libraries and Microsoft Kinect SDK 1.0
Hardware includes - Standard Laptop (Intel Core i5-2410M @ 2.30 GHz, 4GB RAM), Joystick, Kinect Sensor, Arduino Uno Microcontroller, Servo, UPS, Battery, servo motors, h-bridges and wireless transmitter and receiver(Failsafe).
The vehicle also has a fail-safe mechanism that is used to control the vehicle in an emergency using a wireless remote.

Related PDF:
Joystick controlled Cars

Related Video: