SAURAV KSHETRI - IDEAHACKS 2023

I participated in IDEAHACKS held at UCLA by IEEE of UCLA.

Goal: Keeping the theme of gaming, create a product that can help with mundane task/daily activities/habits.

I along with 3 other students from UCLA came up with the idea of making a unique system that allows you to play roshambo with a robotic hand in order to gain access to things that the user decides to put in a custom lock box. The reasoning behind our idea is best explained with an example.

EXAMPLE: Say you have a midterm next week and need to study. You get easily distracted while studying so you decide to put your phone in the custom lock box that only opens if you win 3 times playing roshambo against an algorithm that has a 65% win rate. During the time you make the decision to get your phone by playing a game against the robot, you are constantly thinking about your action and how it would be better if you just studied. It makes you aware of the action you are taking and hopefully deters you from getting distracted.

How the system works?

The system includes camera of the laptop which uses OpenCV to understand what hand gesture the user is making. This way the system knows if the user has their hand as rock, paper, or scissor. While the user is making a decision, an algorithm also makes a decision on either rock, paper, or scissor. Whatever the algorithm decides, result is sent to the mechanical robotic hand which in turn moves the fingers of the hand giving either rock, paper, or scissor. If the user wins 3 times, the custom lock box opens and the user can take whatever they have in the box.

I worked on the design, fabrication, and code of the robotic arm. Most of the existing designs for most robotic hands used strings but strings was not available at the hack and it would be integration hell if we did decide use strings and most likely not finish the project in the given 2 day deadline for the hack. Understanding the time crunch we were in, I decided to go with cam and link mechanism where servos rotated a fixed amount to move the joints by around 90 degrees. I decided to only used 4 servos because powering servos was a problem since hack provided limited parts to us. Everything was 3D printed in the hand with exception of the hardware such as M2 and M3 screws and nuts. I integrated the final assembly of the robotic hand and coded such that it responded to the result of the algorithm.

I am pretty proud of this project because it was very complex as it is very multidisciplinary and we only had 2 days to complete the project. Our team secured third position in the hack competition which made me very happy.