Platform tilt stabilisation using inertial measurement unit sensor

Abstract

This paper aims to develop a low cost two-axis pan-tilt platform stabilisation setup using a low-cost inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensor, utilise elegant and widely used sensor fusion and control algorithm, and demonstrate the performance of such a system. The IMU sensor and the other components for the two-axis platform setup are selected initially based on the design calculations and the platform stabiliser setup is then designed and manufactured in accordance with the selected components. To perform platform stabilisation, reliable pan-tilt angular estimates are required from the IMU sensor. For this purpose, techniques such as sensor bias removal, digital low pass filter (DLPF) and sensor fusion algorithms are deployed considering the robustness of their performance in the real-time embedded hardware. First-order impulse response (FIR) filter is chosen as the DLPF algorithm and the complementary filter (CF) is chosen as the sensor fusion algorithm as these are widely recognised for their need of very less computational power. Finally, the pan-tilt stabilisation is performed by two separate PID servo control tuned using Zeigler-Nichols manual tuning rules and finally the performance of the control system in tracking the angular estimates is finally studied.