Gesture Controlled Robot

Command a robot with nothing more than a little tilt of your hand. Instead of a joystick or a phone app, the controller here is a small board strapped to the back of your hand that senses its own orientation and streams commands to the robot over radio.

How it works

A small PCB — an Arduino Nano, an MPU-9250 inertial measurement unit (IMU) and a 433 MHz RF transmitter — is held to the back of your hand with Velcro. The MPU-9250 measures how far your hand is tilted away from the horizon, and the transmitter encodes that into a compact, secure set of instructions broadcast on the 433 MHz band. A matching RF receiver on the robot decodes those instructions and drives the motors.

Build at a glance

• Controller: Arduino Nano + MPU-9250 IMU + 433 MHz RF transmitter, hand-mounted with Velcro.

• Sensing: the MPU-9250 measures hand tilt relative to the horizon.

• Link: a secure instruction set transmitted over the 433 MHz RF band.

• Robot: an RF receiver decodes the commands and controls the drive motors.

The idea

The result is control that feels effortless and intuitive — steering a machine with the same small movements you'd use to gesture with your hand.