Abstract—As evident, the camera has largely varied applications. The advancements in technology beckon the need for development of optimized control systems. Such a control system is presented, based on transformation of grids/planes and shape memory alloys that prove to be much lighter and faster, thus enabling the use of cameras in areas that are presently found hard. Two linear actuators based on 2-way, step wise actuated, SMAs are coupled together to accurately position one end of a lever, on a plane, that moves the camera mounted at the other end of the lever, with the longer arm, in a spherical plane. The larger spherical plane of the camera is transformed into a much smaller, control plane (planar) of the SMAs using appropriate transformation techniques leading to, apart from a single point, tracing of complex curves with extremely high angular velocities. The large force to weight ratio of an SMA makes the control system extremely light and low power consuming than servo motors, even for relatively heavy cameras. For example, in robotic eyes, motion analysis of objects with known trajectories, so on and so forth.
Index Terms—SMAs, cameras, actuators.
The authors are with SRM University, Chennai, India (e-mail: karan.vaish.93@gmail.com; rakeshvasireddyrk@gmail.com).
Cite: Karan Vaish and Rakesh Vasireddy, "SMA Based Camera Gimbal for Point/Trajectory Tracking," International Journal of Modeling and Optimization vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 52-55, 2013.
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