Camera Gimbal Control from UAV Autopilot Target Tracking

摘要

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is better and safer to carry missionsrnfor aerial photography for terrain feature documentation and surveillance. Anrnaerial photography mechanism for camera gimbal control in conjunctionrnwith UAV autopilot system is proposed in this paper. A GPS-to-GPS targetrntracking is implemented into autopilot flight control system to aim at thernassigned fixed point target. In order to properly control dynamic photography,rncoordinate conversion from airborne gimbal frame into the Earth frame viarnUAV body frame coordinates should be correctly aligned to the target. Tornavoid gimbal lock problem, the 3D quaternion-based attitude estimation fromrnGPS and IMU is formulated. The UAV autopilot and target tracking controlrncan be implemented on microcontroller with a reliable and stablernperformance. A UAV autopilot is designed and implemented mounting withrn3D gimbal fixture for realization and flight tests. Flight experiment resultsrnshow good system performance to accomplish the proposed objective.