A motion controller for a pan-tilt camera on an autonomous helicopter

In this paper, a motion controller for a pan-tilt camera mounted on an autonomous helicopter is presented. The motion planner is designed according to the kinematics of the pan-tilt camera. However, the solution of the inverse kinematics of the pan-tilt camera is not unique. To deal with this situation, a decision maker is designed. The decision maker makes use of a cost function to decide which solution should be chose. And the error signal is defined as the difference between pan-tilt joint angles and the desired joint angles. The dynamics of the error system is derived, and proportional controllers are designed according to the error dynamics to control the pan and tilt joints respectively. This system is validated in a virtual reality environment, and the simulation results show that this system can track the target successfully.