Turret Face Tracker

Turret Face Tracker — An ESP32 Head That Watches You Back

A two-servo pan/tilt turret with an onboard ESP32-Wrover camera that detects a face in its own video frame and turns to keep it centered — no laptop, no external vision server, no cloud inference. Camera capture, face detection, and the proportional pan/tilt control loop all run on the microcontroller itself. Point it at a desk, connect to its local WiFi web UI, click "Start Stream," and it starts hunting for your face.

Built for a high-school computer-technology class (TEJ) by Rylan Hachey, Ashish Agrahari, and Noah Raymond, using the stock ESP32 camera example's face-detection pipeline as the vision core.

How It Works

• An ESP32-Wrover module (PSRAM required — needed for the frame buffer that face detection runs against) hosts its own WiFi access point and a browser-based camera viewer.
• Enabling "Face Detection" in that viewer draws a box around any face in frame and exposes its x, y, width, height through the sketch.
• The main loop maps the face box's offset from center into pan/tilt servo angles (map() from pixel offset to ±90°), moving two SG90-class micro servos on 3D-printed brackets.
• If no face is seen for ~500 loop iterations, it drops into a search mode: sweeping pan back and forth and stepping tilt, until a face reappears.

Build Overview

• Compute + camera: ESP32-Wrover dev board (Freenove or similar, PSRAM required for face detection)
• Actuators: 2x SG90-class micro servos — pan (pin 12) and tilt (pin 13)
• Structure: 3D-printed camera mount, pan bracket, and tilt bracket (originally modeled in Autodesk Inventor; STLs included)
• Firmware: Arduino IDE sketch (ESP32_FaceTrackingV5), built on Espressif's esp_camera + ESP32Servo libraries

Wiring

• PAN servo signal → ESP32 pin 12
• TILT servo signal → ESP32 pin 13
• Both servos' power → ESP32 VCC
• Both servos' ground → ESP32 GND

Flashing the Firmware

1. Install ESP32 board support in the Arduino IDE (setup guide).
2. Board: ESP32 Wrover Module. Partition Scheme: Huge APP (3MB No OTA/1MB SPIFFS).
3. Set your WiFi SSID/password in the sketch, upload to the board.
4. Find the board's IP (Serial Monitor, or your router's client list) and open it in a browser.
5. Click Start Stream, set XCLK = 10MHz, enable V-Flip, Resolution = QVGA (320x240), WB Mode = Sunny, then enable Face Detection.
6. Sit in frame — the turret should start tracking your face.

Note on orobot Control

This build's face-tracking loop is entirely self-hosted on the ESP32 — it does not speak the orobot device protocol, so full closed-loop autonomous tracking happens on the board itself, reachable through its own local web UI rather than through orobot.io. The control interface on this page is a learning stub: a simplified pan/tilt joystick/pose demo using the same 2-servo shape, so you can explore the orobot Program IDE API alongside the original firmware. Flash the linked Arduino sketch to your ESP32-Wrover for the actual closed-loop face-tracking behavior shown in the photos.

Attribution & License

• Creators: Rylan Hachey, Ashish Agrahari, Noah Raymond (FHCI, TEJ Computer Technology class)
• Source repository: github.com/AshishA26/Turret-Face-Tracker
• License: No license file is published in the source repository (defaults to all-rights-reserved under GitHub's terms) — this Program links to and credits the original source rather than redistributing it under an open license. 3D-printed parts (STL) are mirrored here for convenience with full attribution; consult the original authors before commercial reuse.