ECE 110/120 Honors Lab Section : Little Alarm Car

Statement of Purpose

I think the name itself is pretty clear but just for clarification, We want to make a little alarm car that can work as an alarm when it is triggered. There are already many similar products existing but I think it would be fun for us to make one out of our interest with our own design. We want to make a robot that can be controlled remotely. When it is on, it should automatically detect the environment around it(more specifically, the sound, light, and shake). And if the sensors report any kind of uncommon consequence, the robot should use its wheel to quickly start moving around and play the warning message and trigger the alarm all the time. 
The purpose of designing it is for safety in places that do not have a safety reporting system yet, so if people have to leave a place temporarily, they can just put one of this kind of robot to ensure that no one should be entering or do any damage around the station. And also it is just super cool to make an alarm bot that can move around and report suspicious activities, we all like this idea personally. 

Background Research

We did take a look for the similar projects/products that is available, for the previous semester there were people implementing different parts of robots and some simple reaction parts, our project is kind of similar but we are more focused on the idea of a movable alarm car which can move around while detected something.

The currently available products, while definitely should have better precision than our design, are mostly implemented into some places(Like cameras on the wall or similar), while it does provide great security assure, experienced thief can easily find them and destroy them.

Our design would perform better in this way since it would be moving around quickly and continuously reporting the uncommon consequence collected by the sensor, which basically makes it impossible to be destroyed or damaged.

Block Diagram / Flow Chart(First Draft)

System Overview

This is a simplified version of our design,

The sound sensor will be in charge of detecting the sound input

The light sensor will be detecting the light input

The vibration sensor will be detecting the vibration input(Mainly from the ground right now, probably will put one for air too.)

The switch will be the part that can be controlled remotely, to ensure the robot is working or not

The processing part will be determining if the Sound/Light/Vibration input are reaching a dangerous amount that any actions needed to be taken, and if yes send signals to Motors

The Motors will Trigger the Wheels and make the Robot start moving quickly.

Parts(estimated in maximum)

Some kind of PCB-10$

Light Sensor from Adafruit-8$

Vibration Sensor-4$

Switch-2.5$

Controlling Unit-unknown

Motor-80$

Wheels-10$

Possible Challenges

All of our group members are the first time in contact with these materials, so it will be hard for us to work with hardwares the first time.

We need to find an acceptable range for the inputs, which is kind of hard for us since we don't know that much about it.

We also need to find a path controlled for the robot in order to make it doesn't crash into something, this probably would require some additional sensors.

We also need some materials that are strong enough to make sure the robot doesn't fall apart.

We need a dependable power source to keep the robot working for an acceptable amount of time.

We also need to ensure the switch does turn off when the robot is triggered unexpectedly.

References