Development and system integration for an airborne gimbal camera installed on a wing pylon

This document describes the development and system integration process of the Smart- Gimbal device developed by DigiSky Srl, the SmartGimbal is a device that performs the controlling of a an airborne camera in terms of spatial orientation and photographic pa- rameters for aerial survey installed into the SmartBay platform. The SmartBay platform is a patented invention of DigiSky Srl and consists in a general purpose wing pylon able to carry in flight and manage different type of aerial monitoring sensors such as thermal camera, multi spectral camera and so on. The SmartGimbal system provides a structure for integrating of a video camera into the SmartBay platform and control the pointing by the PAN and TILT motion of the camera, and the optical parameters like focus and zoom. DigiSky had already developed a prototype for this device but it could not carry out yet for all the function exposed above and moreover it was absolutely unable to perform a mission ensuring a sufficient level of safety and reliability; This document explains the phases which brought the SmartGimbal project from the prototype state to the operative finished product state, focusing on the technical choices and followed procedures. The final product consist in a solid metal structure able to host a camera assisted by a motion control system composed by two DC actuators with relative encoder and trans- mission chain, this structure can be installed into the SmartBay pylon and through this, the SmartGimbal and the camera can be interfaced with a control panel located into the aircraft cockpit. The communication between the console and the SmartGimbal pylon is carried out with a wired system using an RS232 serial protocol, two logic boards, one for the console and one for the airborne structure; The link between the boards allows to manages the functions of the overall system providing also information about the system status to the user by a display as user interface. The operator inside the cockpit is able to control the camera orientation using a joystick while the camera parameters are controlled with buttons and knobs on a panel. The airborne camera provides as output an SDI video signal directly displayed on a monitor in order to be managed for the specific mission profile. At the end of the development, some flight tests were conduced in order to verify the system relaiability and expected functionality.