A custom designed and manufactured gimbal with a wide field-of-view and fast response time is developed. This
enhanced custom design is a 24 volt system with integrated motor controllers and drivers which offers a full 180o fieldof-
view in both azimuth and elevation; this provides a more continuous tracking capability as well as increased velocities
of up to 479° per second. The addition of active high-frequency vibration control, to complement the passive vibration
isolation system, is also in development.
The ultimate goal of this research is to achieve affordable, reliable, and secure air-to-air laser communications between
two separate remotely piloted aircraft. As a proof-of-concept, the practical implementation of an air-to-ground laserbased
video communications payload system flown by a small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) will be demonstrated.
A numerical tracking algorithm has been written, tested, and used to aim the airborne laser transmitter at a stationary
ground-based receiver with known GPS coordinates; however, further refinement of the tracking capabilities is
dependent on an improved gimbal design for precision pointing of the airborne laser transmitter.
The current gimbal pointing system is a two-axis, commercial-off-the-shelf component, which is limited in both range
and velocity. The current design is capable of 360o of pan and 78o of tilt at a velocity of 60o per second. The control
algorithm used for aiming the gimbal is executed on a PC-104 format embedded computer onboard the payload to
accurately track a stationary ground-based receiver. This algorithm autonomously calculates a line-of-sight vector in
real-time by using the UAV autopilot's Differential Global Positioning System (DGPS) which provides latitude,
longitude, and altitude and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) which provides the roll, pitch, and yaw data, along with the
known Global Positioning System (GPS) location of the ground-based photodiode array receiver.
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