Designing a Prototype for Smartphone Footage Stabilization

Abstract

Hardware stabilizers are on high demand due to the increasing use of media capture devices such as smartphones and portable cameras in market. Hence an effort is made to develop a stabilizer prototype with Inertial measurement Unit (MPU 6050 sensor), arduino Uno microcontroller and servo motor. Using existing libraries of arduino, a code is developed to read the position of the smartphone by the sensor and is fed to arduino microcontroller. The microcontroller generates an appropriate PWM signal based on the output of sensor and sends it to two servo motors to nullify the effect of jitter produced by the movement of the smartphone along roll and pitch axes respectively. Stabilized footage is produced by smartphones compensating the movement along roll and pitch axes respectively. The cost of this developed prototype is very low compared to existing gimbal systems in the market.