Design and Control of a Compact High-Dynamic Camera-Orientation System

The concept of a small 2-DOF camera-orientation system is presented and verified through prototype testing. This system is able to orient a camera around its pan and tilt axis with dynamics exceeding those of the human eyes. At the same time, the system is lightweight enough to be mounted on a human's head. These characteristics are very important, considering the application as part of a gaze-driven head-mounted camera system and as artificial eye for humanoid robots. The direct and the inverse kinematic models of the system are derived. A dynamic simulation for the actuator selection is carried out as well. The developed prototype is based on a piezoactuator-driven parallel kinematics. Experiments with closed-loop position controllers demonstrate good tracking performance and image quality of the system.