Spidercam With Live Camera Stream

[This project was done as part of the EEE318 Control Systems Laboratory of Level 3, Term 2 of BUET]
The project features a spidercam system with live streaming camera with a web interface. For the spidercam 3D maneuver, 2 Arduinos have been used as the microcontroller to precisely control 4 stepper motors. ESP32 camera module has been used for live streaming and an asynchronous TCP web server has been programmed into the ESP32 controller. An HTML/JavaScript based web interface has been made for wireless live stream of the camera feed.

Theory

Controlling an object's coordinate in 3D with 4 strings

4 strings of length l1, l2, l3, l4 are attached to 4 poles of height h. The base area has dimensions a*b. A specific value of the set {l1, l2, l3, l4} corresponds to a unique (x,y,z) coordinate of the tied point on the tip of the strings.

The relation between {l1, l2, l3, l4} and (x,y,z) can be found from 3D coordinate geometry as:

$l_1 = \sqrt{(x-0)^2 + (y-b)^2 + (z-h)^2}$
$l_2 = \sqrt{(x-a)^2 + (y-b)^2 + (z-h)^2}$
$l_3 = \sqrt{(x-0)^2 + (y-0)^2 + (z-h)^2}$
$l_4 = \sqrt{(x-a)^2 + (y-0)^2 + (z-h)^2}$

Considering the string is attached with a cylinder of radius r, to change a string length by $\Delta l$, the cylinder has to be rotated by an angle.

$\Theta = \frac{\Delta l}{r}$

By rotating the stepper motor with the proper angle, each wire length can be adjusted to achieve a desired (x,y,z) coordinate.

Code

Folder arduino1_final_concurrent holds the microcontroller code for controlling stepper motor 1,2. Folder arduino2_final_concurrent holds the microcontroller code for controlling stepper motor 3,4. esp_camera_stream holds the code for the live wireless camera stream system.

Implementation

For implementation details and demonstration see the project paper.