ECE 110/120 Honors Lab Section : Automated Laser Pointer Turret

Statement of Purpose

Our project is a moving laser turret that can track and shine on targets. The project goals are to set up an infrared camera and a Raspberry Pi/Arduino system that can recognize a warm target’s torso and beam a laser flash at the target. The turret itself will also be made to rotate using servo motors and cogs, which will allow it to have a tracking window that lets it aim better. This project is unique because we are looking into a laser turret that can aim at a person and flash automatically.

Background Research

In video games such as the Portal series, weaponized turrets often use lasers to point at their target. We want to create a laser pointer that mimicked that function without shooting anything. As research for our project, we looked at other laser pointer projects online that utilize Arduinos. Unsurprisingly, most of the ones we found had the purpose of entertaining pets. So although the physical parts of our project will largely be the same, we will implement a more complex program that will let it track people instead of being manually controlled.

Inspiration:

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:953753

https://create.arduino.cc/projecthub/circuito-io-team/how-to-make-a-cat-laser-pointer-5f6307

https://create.arduino.cc/projecthub/happy-puppy-or-not/fido-s-automated-laser-pointer-9be48a?ref=tag&ref_id=lasers&offset=20

https://storiknow.com/automatic-cat-laser-pointer-toy-using-the-raspberry-pi/

Block Diagram / Flow Chart

System Overview

• The "Turret is Powered" block is used to represent the systems of the turret being activated.
• The first conditional statement is used to detect whether or not the turret sees a target, with a loop being made until a target is detected. 
• Once a target is found, the laser will be pointed to the warmest part of the target (which in the case of a human, is the torso). 
• The second conditional statement is meant to check if the target is still the field of view of the turret. If it is still detected, tracking continues. If not, it will return to the dormant state of looking for a target. 
• The turret will continue to fire until the experiment is ended (i.e. power is cut or an infinite amount of time passes).

Parts

Possible Challenges

1. Converting the image from the infrared camera into tracking can be an issue. We aren’t too well versed with the software component so a bit of work will have to be done there.

         1A. Our experience with coding is very limited, so ensuring that the software side of this project  works well, we will have to put in a lot of time.

       2. The Raspberry Pi may not have enough RAM to run the software, we will have to see whether or not a newer model is needed. 

       3. There may be an issue with supplying power depending on how complex the program on the Raspberry Pi is. 

References

L. Kester, “Fido's Automated Laser Pointer,” Arduino Project Hub, 30-Mar-2016. [Online]. Available: https://create.arduino.cc/projecthub/happy-puppy-or-not/fido-s-automated-laser-pointer-9be48a?ref=tag&ref_id=lasers&offset=20. [Accessed: 20-Feb-2022]. 

K. Thomas, “Rubber bands sentry gun by Tristomietitoredeituit,” Thingiverse, 03-Aug-2015. [Online]. Available: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:953753. [Accessed: 20-Feb-2022]. 

Circuito.io Team, “How to make a cat laser pointer,” Arduino Project Hub, 28-Mar-2018. [Online]. Available: https://create.arduino.cc/projecthub/circuito-io-team/how-to-make-a-cat-laser-pointer-5f6307. [Accessed: 20-Feb-2022]. 

S. Storino, “Automatic Cat Laser Pointer toy using the Raspberry Pi,” StoriKnow, 11-May-2018. [Online]. Available: https://storiknow.com/automatic-cat-laser-pointer-toy-using-the-raspberry-pi/. [Accessed: 20-Feb-2022].