Design and Implementation of a Quadcopter Drone Control System for Photography Applications

Quadcopter drones equipped with onboard cameras are increasingly being utilized in photography to obtain pictures that would otherwise be impossible or too expensive to shoot. The portability and flexibility of quadcopter drones is often utilized by amateur photographers. An important aspect of designing a quadcopter drone for photography applications is ensuring that the drone will automatically stabilize and remain steady to ensure the perfect shot, without needing input on part of the user. To achieve this purpose, a quadcopter drone uses a control system with tuned parameters to remain as steady as possible. This paper describes an implementation of a quadcopter control system using a PID controller and Kalman filter to improve the inputs from the onboard gyroscope, to make the drone as steady as possible for a perfect shot.