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.

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Team Comments

I had always thought a drone controlled by a glove would be a cool concept, but as of entering highschool I had the resources to make it a reality! I wanted to learn, and making this has taught me tons of things like programming, soldering, laser cutting, 3D printing, Adobe Illustrator-ing and more!

Every step of the way has had some challenge. I went into this project with practically no experience and a dream, of course there were bound to be difficulties. However, working through those trials (often asking my teacher for help) helped me learn more about the technology I'm so fascinated with.

Not really; this project has been primarily about learning technology, including arduino, 3d printing, programming, circuitry, fabrication, and more. And also to make a cool drone that I can control with a glove. For those things, it's done exactly what I hoped it would.