Introduction

In the beginning of my junior year of undergrad, I decided to pursue honors in Mechanical Engineering. It entailed doing some Master's level coursework in 5^th and 6^th semester, along with completing an honors project by the end of our senior year. As a mini-project in my 6^th semester, I had made a multi-DOF cinematography pod for 'CinePad' which used a linear slider with mike stand and gooseneck mobile holder for smooth smartphone cinematography.

For Cinepad 2.0, I decided to extend it to a 3-axis camera gimbal for smartphones as the honors project. I aimed to come up with a system for counterbalancing any perturbations, induced due to walking or irregular terrains, through active stabilization for better hand-held cinematography. It involved mechanical modelling, forward kinematics, and dynamic characterization of the gimbal along with control system design in MATLAB Simulink.