Whopper™ Popper: A Projectile-Launching System for Self-Feeding Using Facial Recognition and Tracking

The Whopper™ Popper is an autonomous robot created to recognize and track a human face, and launch a small, approximately spherical, hard candy (a Whoppers™) into a user's mouth. The primary application of the device is for entertainment, but it can be used in other ways after the implementation of the future work. The system utilizes facial recognition to find the target, a person's face, for aiming the candy launching assembly towards the target as well as a distance to target algorithm to determine how far the projectile needs to be fired in order to make it to the target. Additionally, through control of vertical and horizontal motors, the software is able to continuously track its target so that the user's face is always centered in the camera frame. This robot pairs through a Bluetooth™ module in order to trigger a Whoppers™ to be fired. The Whopper™ Popper has a high accuracy of landing in or within millimeters of the person's mouth excepting deviations in trajectory due to variances in the size and shape of Whoppers™. Future works include the addition of a reloading mechanism, voice activation features, and reworking the distance-to-target algorithm in order to increase accuracy.