Gesture-Controlled Rover

A hand-glove controller paired with a rover — tilt, rotate, or point your hand and the rover follows. Conceived as a general gesture-controlled platform that could carry anything. Built over a few weekends.

Context
Personal experiment in motion-controlled mobile robotics
Role
Designer and builder.

Bill of materials

  • Arduino
  • IMU + gyro
  • 433 MHz + 2.4 GHz radios
  • DC motors
  • Plywood chassis

The idea was a general-purpose rover platform you could drive just by moving your hand. The glove held an IMU and gyro feeding an Arduino over 433 MHz; the rover ran a receiver and translated orientation changes into motor commands. Tilt forward → drive forward; twist → rotate; pitch up → stop. Calibrated with a neutral-position hold at boot.

Why a rover

I wasn’t precious about the chassis — it was plywood and DC motors and lithium batteries, deliberately boring. The point was the control layer. The conceptual plan was for the same glove to drive arbitrary attachments: a camera rig, a small manipulator, a tracked-treads upgrade for rougher terrain, whatever. Maybe something useful in a risk-evacuation setting where you want remote eyes somewhere humans shouldn’t go yet. I stopped at the base prototype — it drove around correctly and felt natural to control — without chasing any of those specific end-uses.

What was interesting about the build

This was where I started mixing radio bands deliberately. Control commands on 433 MHz (good range, simple, low bandwidth — fine for sending orientation deltas ten times a second) and any higher-bandwidth telemetry on 2.4 GHz. That dual-radio pattern showed up again in later projects.

A weekend experiment, not a product. But one of the projects that made “move a thing with a hand gesture” feel like a solved problem I could pull off the shelf later.