Image-Based Pointing and Tracking for Inertially Stabilized Airborne Camera Platform

This paper describes a novel image-based pointing-tracking feedback control scheme for an inertially stabilized double-gimbal airborne camera platform combined with a computer vision system. The key idea is to enhance the intuitive decoupled controller structure with measurements of the camera inertial angular rate around its optical axis. The resulting controller can also compensate for the apparent translation between the camera and the observed object, but then the velocity of this mutual translation must be measured or estimated. Even though the proposed controller is more robust against longer sampling periods of the computer-vision system then the decoupled controller, a sketch of a simple compensation of this delay is also given. Numerical simulations are accompanied by laboratory experiments with a real benchmark system.