So I recently got into building camera gimbals, which is a handheld camera stabilization system.
With the readings of an IMU (Accelerometer and Gyrometer) mounted on the camera, the system can sense how much the camera is tilting and to which direction, using these sensor readings a correction value is calculated using PID algorithm and fed to the motors mounted on the three axis (roll, pitch, yaw). This corrective movement of the motors keep the camera always horizontal no matter how the Gimbal is tilted.
All this has been made very easy by the open source electronics community, there are many processor boards which are built for Gimbals and have your PID codes already written as firmware. I used Alexmos SimpleBGC 32 bit board and DYS Brushless Gimbal motors.
The first part is to build the mechanical frame and mount the motors accurately, the frame must be very well balanced in order for the Gimbal to perform well. Aluminium plates of of 4mm width were used for the frame, we needed help of milling machine, cutting machine and drills in our college workshop.
Here is the Gimbal with my Canon EOS 600D mounted on it;
After initial PID calibration, the Gimbal was performing pretty well.
Here is a test video shot by the cameraman holding the Gimbal while riding on a scooter,
A lot more is yet to be posted on my work with gimbals, have built a bigger and much better gimbal recently. Will update the blog in time.
Cheers!