Gimbal Control Directly from Flight Controller

Hardware Other Hardware
1

Hello guys,

I’ve been reading about ArduPilot for long time and have plans to build a drone for learning how everything works. One thing that I want to ask about is whether it is conceivably possible to have the flight controller also control a gimbal, using the same attitude estimation mechanism that is already being used to stabilize the drone.

That is, if we mount a gimbal with 3 motor controllers that react to PWM inputs for position or speed control, can we modify ArduPilot (let’s say for a quadcopter) to also output 3 additional PWM signals for the gimbal and somehow include this in code? I could see that this could be directly proportional to the pitch/roll/yaw outputs of the attitude controller.

For example, we know that we are -10 degrees on the roll axis of the drone, we command the gimbal to go +10 degrees on it’s roll axis, and so forth.

Since cameras are getting better and with fast capture, like 1/1000 shutter on Sony cameras, maybe this type of gimbal would be sufficient to reduce cost and hardware to avoid having to buy something bigger, heavier, and more expensive, like a Gremsy, but still enough to capture good results for photogrammetry.

Can anyone comment about whether this might be feasible?

Thanks.

2

Like this?
Servo gimbal

3

If you want good performance with low cost I would recomend a Storm32 DIY gimbal. It is supported by Ardupilot and can do the things you want. However, it requires effort to get that performance.

Here is the wiki of the gimbal: STorM32-BGC Wiki
And here of Ardupilot: STorM32 Gimbal Controller — Copter documentation

4

Hi @dkemxr

Yes, this looks actually like what I want to do, except with a BLDC gimbal instead of servos. I guess I didn’t search for the right terms because I didn’t see it yet. Thank you for your help.

Do you know if anyone has had good (or at least decent) luck with this strategy?

@Iker_Martinez I appreciate your reply as well. With the Storm32, it still requires a totally separate controller though, as I understand, and my goal would be to have the flight controller do all of the processing and just output PWM signals to a gimbal that is just motors and motor controllers. Does that make sense?

5

No direct experience but it’s more common to use a gimbal controller.