Camera gimbal control in Drone Programming - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Camera gimbal control

📖 Scenario: You are programming a drone's camera gimbal to keep the camera steady and pointed correctly during flight. The gimbal can tilt up and down and pan left and right. You want to control the gimbal angles based on input commands.

🎯 Goal: Build a simple program that stores initial gimbal angles, sets limits for movement, updates the angles based on commands, and prints the final gimbal position.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a dictionary to store the gimbal angles for tilt and pan.

Create variables to store the minimum and maximum allowed angles for tilt and pan.

Write code to update the gimbal angles based on input commands, ensuring the angles stay within limits.

Print the final gimbal angles after applying the commands.

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Camera gimbals on drones keep the camera steady and pointed correctly even when the drone moves. Programming the gimbal angles helps capture smooth videos and photos.

💼 Career

Drone operators and developers use gimbal control programming to improve aerial photography and videography quality.

1

Set initial gimbal angles

Create a dictionary called gimbal_angles with two keys: 'tilt' set to 0 and 'pan' set to 0.

Drone Programming

# Create the gimbal_angles dictionary with tilt and pan set to 0
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use curly braces to create a dictionary with keys 'tilt' and 'pan'. Set both values to 0.

2

Set gimbal angle limits

Create four variables: min_tilt set to -90, max_tilt set to 30, min_pan set to -180, and max_pan set to 180.

Drone Programming

gimbal_angles = {'tilt': 0, 'pan': 0}
# Create min_tilt, max_tilt, min_pan, max_pan variables with given values
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Assign the exact numbers to the variables as given.

3

Update gimbal angles with limits

Given a list commands = [('tilt', 20), ('pan', -200), ('tilt', -100)], write a for loop using variables axis and angle_change to update gimbal_angles[axis] by adding angle_change. After each update, ensure gimbal_angles['tilt'] stays between min_tilt and max_tilt, and gimbal_angles['pan'] stays between min_pan and max_pan.

Drone Programming

gimbal_angles = {'tilt': 0, 'pan': 0}
min_tilt = -90
max_tilt = 30
min_pan = -180
max_pan = 180
commands = [('tilt', 20), ('pan', -200), ('tilt', -100)]
# Write a for loop to update gimbal_angles with limits
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a for loop to go through each command. Add the angle change to the correct axis. Then check if the new angle is outside the limits and fix it.

4

Print final gimbal angles

Write a print statement to display the gimbal_angles dictionary.

Drone Programming

gimbal_angles = {'tilt': 0, 'pan': 0}
min_tilt = -90
max_tilt = 30
min_pan = -180
max_pan = 180
commands = [('tilt', 20), ('pan', -200), ('tilt', -100)]
for axis, angle_change in commands:
    gimbal_angles[axis] += angle_change
    if axis == 'tilt':
        if gimbal_angles['tilt']  max_tilt:
            gimbal_angles['tilt'] = max_tilt
    elif axis == 'pan':
        if gimbal_angles['pan']  max_pan:
            gimbal_angles['pan'] = max_pan
# Print the gimbal_angles dictionary
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print(gimbal_angles) to show the final angles.