Active Vibration Isolation System for Drone Cameras

Abstract

Drones are small unmanned aerial vehicles, often equipped with imaging system, which can be controlled remotely. During the drone flight, the camera is subjected to vibrations which hamper the quality of the captured images/videos. The high-frequency vibrations from the drone are transmitted to the camera. Conventionally, passive rubber mounts are used to isolate the camera from the drone vibrations. The passive mounts are able provide reduction in response near the resonance. However, this comes at the cost of amplification at the higher frequencies. This paper proposes an active vibration isolation system which exhibits improved performance at the higher frequencies compared to the conventional system. The system consists of introducing an intermediate active system between the drone and the conventional system (i.e., camera with passive rubber mounts). Experiments are carried out to characterize the drone vibrations are being transmitted to the camera. A test bench is developed to study the effect of these vibrations on the quality of the images captured. The quality of images captured is expressed in terms of pixel-to-signal noise ratio (PSNR). The transmissibility of the camera with passive rubber mounts is also evaluated experimentally. Three different isolation systems are proposed based on the degrees of freedom that needs to be controlled. Controller architecture for the isolation systems is designed and evaluated numerically. The response of the camera with passive isolation, when integrated with proposed isolation system, is found to reduce at high frequency without compromising the reduction in response at lower frequencies.

Effects and Prospects of the Vibration Isolation Methods for an Atomic Interference Gravimeter

“…An active vibration isolation system has been widely applied in metrological, photoetching and medical fields as well as semiconductor industry. In the study of the active vibration isolation system for an AIG, research institutions have developed a variety of vibration isolation systems and achieved good effective improvements to measurement accuracy and sensitivity [83][84][85]. Hensley et al of the Stanford University, USA designed an experimental system with vertical ground motion and atomic gravimeter isolation as given in [86].…”

Active stabilization of unmanned aerial vehicle imaging platform

“…To study the different configurations, the camera is idealized as rigid mass (equal to 0.5 kg, obtained by weighting), whereas the passive rubber isolation is represented by a spring-dashpot system. The natural frequency of the camera with the passive isolation system is taken as 10 Hz, and the damping ratio is assumed to be 0.1 (Bartel et al, 2018;Verma and Collette, 2019). Based on the preliminary design, The stiffness and damping associated with the active element (actuator) are assumed to be 10 and 0.1 times that of the passive isolation, respectively.…”

Perfect collocation using self-sensing electromagnetic actuator: Application to vibration control of flexible structures

“…These mounts, although effective in reducing the response near resonance, degrade the response at high frequencies (adding damping to the system). Many active mounts have been developed but they work only in one direction [17,18]. This motivated the development of a six degrees of freedom isolation system for drone camera where high quality images are required.…”