A Control System For A 3-Axis Camera Stabilizer

The purpose of the project is to implement a control system for a 3- axis camera stabilizer. The stabilization is done by controlling three blushless DC motors driving the yaw, pitch and roll movements of the camera stabilizer's frame, respectively. The stabilizer's frame (equipped with three motors) is used in this project, and it is directly taken from a commercial product, Feiyu Tech G4S. The control system concerned in this project consists of a Teensy 3.6 microcontroller unit (MCU) implemented with three PID controllers, the motor drivers to drive the three motors, and an inertial measurement unit (IMU) of 9 degrees of freedom.The MCU is also used to process the IMU angle measurements of the camera position in 3- axis motion, in particular, it converts the IMU raw data to an angle for each of the axis, it then processes the angle data using a Kalman filter to reduce the noise. In the end of the project a prototype has been built and tested, it uses the control system to run the stabilizing process. It is shown to work quite successfully. In particular, it can run smoothly in the roll and pitch axes and compensate for unwanted movement, however the yaw axis does not function as intended due to a misplacement as well as poor calibration process of the magnetometer sensor in the IMU, which is left for future work