Team members:
- Matt Freeman
- James Kirby
- Juan Rivera
Our group, Team Doki Doki, proposes to design a paintball gun auto-tracking/sensing system. It will feature a stripped-down paintball gun that is controlled via two stepper motors. One stepper motor rotates the gun left/right (most likely on a Lazy Susan) and a second stepper motor controls the up/down movement of the barrel. A linear actuator will be used to physically pull the gun's trigger. The stepper motors and actuator will be connected to the GPIO of a Xilinx Spartan 3 board. The board's FPGA will run a state machine with two main modes of operation: manual and automatic. When in manual mode, the left/right, up/down, and firing performance of the gun will be adjusted via an NES videogame controller connected to the serial port of the Spartan 3. This mode will be implemented first, as it will be the more straightforward of the two. The NES controller will also be used to switch the state machine between auto/manual modes. When switched into automatic control, the gun will either scan for or track a certain type of target. This target may be a certain color, if we end up implementing video capture and analysis into the board, or it may be using IR, which would require the target to be wearing an IR sensor. Perhaps there is even another method? Currently, we are not sure what will be most feasible while still yielding some practical application.
This auto-tracking gun could have two potentially marketable uses. First, it could be used rather directly as a "sentry gun" in paintball arenas. It would scan for human players, potentially only those from a certain team, and create an additional hazard they must avoid. This would create another interesting aspect to the popular game of paintball. Second, it could be used as a home security device. The gun could placed in front of a door or window and automatically perform non-lethal attacks to scare away intruders while the homeowner sleeps or is out. Such an implementation could be especially useful for those with hearing and/or vision problems, as they may have trouble detecting the intruder on their own. Note that both of these uses would be more practical if the auto-sensing/tracking mode of the gun were based on thermal detection, although this form of targeting is not fiscally reasonable for our prototype.