Software‐based camera stabilisation on unmanned aircraft

The concept of software‐based camera control and stabilisation and test results for two degree‐of‐freedom onboard cameras are presented in this paper. Contrary to the conventional gimballed observation cameras, the presented solution makes lightweight gimbal's construction possible. The unmanned aircraft state measurements and information of the target position are used in the computation of the desired angles of the camera rotation axes. The method has been tested using simulation technique. The results obtained in this paper show the need for fast enough camera actuation to stabilise image when aircraft attitude is disturbed by turbulence and attitude changes as a manoeuvre effect. The quantitative relationship between the parameters of camera actuators and achievable pointing accuracy are shown for exemplary flight condition simulation test.