About this project
Most racers use a traditional RC car controller, usually a big and cumbersome joystick to control cars, and a decent quality joystick does not come cheap. Yet it is rigid and not flexible which can obviously spoil your racing experience, as most joysticks only allow you a four-directional movement that of left, right, forward and backward.
Now you can play it like driving a car, use your arms to control and make turns like you would with a steering wheel. Drive the coolest car around with our Ultigesture Gesture-Controlled Smart Car– with its strong and powerful engine connected with very stable Bluetooth, it gives you a 360-degree access to the race. As a result, racers get a precise and realistic racing experience and anyone can easily master learning the gestures in just a few minutes.
You can control our smart cars by 2 modes -- wristband-based Gesture Control Mode and smartphone-based Tilt Control Mode.
The Gesture Control Mode uses innovative gesture recognition and control technology to recognize your gestures through our smart wristband, and so to control the car accordingly. To deliver the most realistic racing experience, we consulted lots of RC car racers and defined our gestures accordingly.
First, racers raise the forearm horizontally and rotate the wrist to start the gesture control. When the racer moves the forearm up, the car goes forward. Moving the forearm down makes the car go backward. A slight clockwise turn makes the car turn right, and counter-clockwise makes it turn left. The farther the wrist moves, the faster the speed!
The Tilt Control Mode allows you to control our smart cars more easily on Android phones or smart watches by combining racing and control seamlessly. By tilting a smartphone running our Android app, a racer is given a new way to control the Ultigesture Smart Car. In this Tilt Control Mode, the smartphone works as the steering wheel for the car.
The wristband is small and comfortable enough to wear. It is very accurate and can recognize all the hand gestures. Data comes from the sensors in the wristband – an accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer – so racers can use predefined gestures to control the car.
In addition to control smart cars, Ultigesture smart wristband is also used to control mobile robots.
For the smart car, we use high-quality ABS engineering plastics and eco-friendly shock resistant materials. Our car is tough and impact-resistant.
We here at Ultigesture are a team led by a professor of the Department of Computer Science at William and Mary. We have many years of research experience in gesture recognition and gesture-based control. We are in the process of applying our research in real-word application scenarios. We would like more people to experience this cutting-edge research.
Dr. Gang Zhou is an Associate Professor of the Computer Science Department at the College of William and Mary. His recent research includes wearable computing and smart devices. He is a Senior Member of the American Computer Society (ACM) and the American Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He received a Faculty Early Career Award from U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF CAREER) in 2013, and the 2015 Plumeri Award for Faculty Excellence at William and Mary. More information can be found at www.cs.wm.edu/~gzhou
Eric Zhao is a Ph.D. candidate. He is specialized in the development and research for gesture recognition and control technologies. He got his Master’s Degree from Zhejiang University in 2014 and Bachelor’s Degree from Shanghai Jiaotong University in 2011. His current research focus is wearable computing.
Jingyang Zhou is an Internet operations specialist. He was a former Director of Sales for Intel Corporation in Shanghai, China and has many years of marketing and sales experience.
Risks and challenges
Since the first prototype, we have done a lot of modifications to our PCB design and software to make the product stable. We will continue to improve gesture recognition accuracy, battery lifetime, radio control distance, and wristband appearance. Our product will be thoroughly tested before manufacturing.
There are significant challenges in manufacturing. We have good relationships with our manufacturing partners and will make sure the manufacturing process is under control.
There are also risks associated with delivery. Unexpected changes in component lead times, availability, and costs are outside of our control and could affect delivery time. But we will try our best to deliver the products on time.
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Funding period
- (60 days)