Glove Controlled Drone

The Project

I’ve always had a fascination with flight; not as in gigantic airplanes that I could only be a passenger on, but as the one doing the flying. Movies like Ironman always drew me for that reason, and I wanted to get closer to that intimacy with the sky. For that reason, I decided to try to make a drone that I could control with gestures. Using joysticks is a disconnect of sorts, a middleman if you will, but I wanted to break that disconnect. I didn’t want to have to use a controller, I wanted to be the controller. I had 0 experience with Arduino, only an intermediate background in Java, and had literally never soldered before, but I knew that I had the tools to learn them and figured that such an ambitious project would teach me a lot about all of those fields. This project involved multiple stages, such as constructing a car for initial glove control tests to avoid potential damage to the more delicate drone. Before building a drone from scratch, I decided it was necessary to first familiarize myself with standard drone construction. After that, I'd try to figure out a way to control the drone with the glove rather than the regular controller and implement it, which is the stage that I'm at as of today! I admit that the project's complexity exceeded my initial skillset. Because of this, I approached this challenge by breaking down tasks into manageable steps. For example, instead of attempting to control the entire car at once, I first focused on just establishing a wireless connection between the two microcontrollers. Creating a simplified roadmap of tasks helped me concentrate on one aspect at a time and dedicate full attention to each task.

View this project on YouTube