Measuring an object in 2D space... Help?

Forum 2005-2010 (read only) Hardware Interfacing
1

Hi there

I wont lie, I have never used an arduino before, and up untill this afternoon I had no idea what one was... so please excuse my lack of knowledge on the subject at hand.

For an interactive architectural installation we are looking at moving a set of vertical louvers so that they maintain their direction pointing at a person in front of them... We have been advised an arduino is the thing to use. We have set up simaler senarios using the infrared camera from a wii remote to do human tracing, however this neccesatates the person being tracked to have a led light somewhere on them, so this wont work.

My idea was to use two pings, at ever end of the facade, to measure distance to an object in space. using pyphags theorim, we should therefor be able to triangulate that objects exact position in frount of the facade. would this work?

My seconf theory would be based on the idea of radar.. if the ping proximity sensor is spinning, when it picks up an object it has two data sets to play with.. namely distance to the object and the degree of its revolution it was in when it sensed the object; hence you could again figure out exactly where that object is...???? posible????

any help on this idea would be greatly appreciated. we have a robotics tech who is happy to do all the programming involved, we just need to know what would be theoretically possible in order to carry on with our design brief.

thanks!

James

2

The ping sensor while it works is not as accurate and reliable as you might wish.
I wouldn't bother with the moving sensor as there will be a bit of a mix up between angular position and distance.
However you could mount the ping sensor on a stepping motor and take the readings from two or three different fixed positions.

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are there any other sensors that come to mind that could do something similar?

what if you put a sensor above each of the louvers, and each sensor had some sort of fabricated cone-peice so that it could only view directly infrount of it, then it simply measured an object present/or not present dataset.... you could then tell the other louvers all to point to the direction where a sensor had picked up the presence of an object? would that work?

thanks for your help, i had no idea replys would come so quicky :slight_smile:

cheers

4

are there any other sensors that come to mind that could do something similar

Not remote ones. You could use pressure mats on the floor.

what if you put a sensor above each of the louvers,

Yes that sounds like it would have a good chance of working.

i had no idea replys would come so quicky

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