An FPV drone whose camera turns with the pilot's head.
FPV Drones Robotics Head Tracking
Normal FPV cameras are fixed to the frame, so the pilot can only look where the drone points. I put the camera on a 2-axis gimbal driven by a head tracker in the goggles, so the pilot can look around freely while flying.
What I Did
01Designed and 3D printed a lightweight 2-axis camera gimbal.
02Routed head-tracker output from the goggles through the radio to gimbal servos via flight-controller passthrough.
03Wrote custom mixing to map head movement to servo motion, and tuned it for smooth video.
Technical Highlights
01
The gimbal
A lightweight 2-axis gimbal, designed and printed to hold the FPV camera at the front of the frame, built for durability in crashes and smooth motion.
Side view — camera gimbal on the front of the frame.Top view of the build.
02
Head-to-camera signal path
An IMU in the goggles measures head orientation. That signal goes into the radio, over the control link to the flight controller, and out to the gimbal servos as passthrough channels. Custom mixing maps head angles to servo positions, and the path was kept short to minimise lag between moving your head and the view changing.
