Study on the inertial stabilization of a payload by center of gravity displacement

The aim of a gimballed stabilization system is to maintain the orientation of a sensor, camera or other device constant, isolating it from disturbances caused by the movement and accelerations of the vehicle on which it is mounted. In this paper we study the design of an inertially stabilized platform (ISP) to be mounted on a host vehicle. The stabilizing mechanism consists of a two-axis gimbal with passive joints onto which a payload tray and a counterweight with adjustable position are assembled. We propose to achieve stabilization of the payload by adjusting the position of the counterweight in three dimensions to locate the center of gravity of the payload-counterweight system at the crossing point of the passive gimbal orthogonal rotation axes. Achieving static balance with the proposed method has been confirmed with an experimental setup.