Design and Control of a Small Intelligent Camera Stabilizer for a Flapping-Wing Robotic Bird

A Flapping-wing robotic bird is an aircraft that mimics the structure and flight of a bird. It flies by fluttering the wings and uses the tail to adjust the attitude of the fuselage in real time. Such type of flight poses a challenge for visual surveillance, because the position of its center of mass and the attitude of the body are very difficult to maintain stable and supply ideal conditions for the camera on it. In this paper, we develop a small intelligent camera stabilizer for a flapping-wing robotic bird. It is designed by considering the flight characteristics and the constrains on size, power and mass. It is composed of mechanical subsystem, sensing subsystem and an embedded controller. The main mechanism has 3-DOF, including 1-DOF for telescopic structure and 2-DOF for attitude adjustment. The sensing subsystem uses MPU6050 as attitude sensor and uses attitude quaternion to calculate Euler angle of both robotic bird and camera. The embedded controller is based on STM32F4 microchip and the Keil Uvision5 platform. Finally, the camera stabilizer is fabricated by integrating the subsystems. It only has 52 g in mass. Furthermore, it is tested and experimented. The results show that it has good stabilizing effect.