Proprietary Nature of Existing Products

The primary research about stabilisation are usually in regards to the stabilisation of a weapon mounted on a vehicle (e.g. canons on ships, or missile launchers on aeroplanes), and so reflects knowledge very specialised (and at terms confidential) to weapons systems. Camera stabilisation research, on the other hand, tend to be commercially researched and are pretty much trade secrets, and thus not available to the general public.

Problem

Often times in research, one has specialised equipment one needs for a particular measurement, and these equipment might not mount in the same way as cameras, or might not have the same kind of mass (see next point). Thus, for passive stabilisation, lots of rigging needs to be done to make the stabiliser work with the equipment, while for active stabilisation, reverse engineering is needed to allow it to interact with the stabiliser controls.

Our Aim

Replicability. Design and document the making of our stabiliser so that it will be possible for anyone else (e.g. subsequent making & tinkering participants) to follow the instructions and build their own. Therefore, if there is a need for a stabiliser for some equipment in another project (which is becoming more common given the prevalence of drones), they can adapt our plans to allow it to work with their own material, and even interface with our active components directly.

Stratification by Weight

Camera stabilisers are usually split into classes of weight (Phones, Sports Cameras, Mirrorless, SLR), which is a necessity given that they mostly work via a counterweight system. Thus, it is inevitable that a passive stabiliser is about as heavy as the object it is stabilising.

Problem

An SLR stabiliser might not work properly with a Mirrorless camera, since the counterweight might cause it to be overdamped. Hence, a consumer would need to have a stabiliser for each weight category, or, if they only have one, it might even limit the lens/accessory choices for their camera.

Our Aim

We hope to somehow incorporate the inerter, a device that provides a term of motion proportional to acceleration based on the principle of the moment of inertia. Due to its inertia being caused by rotational motion, it can provide a much larger inertia than that of a mass of the same mass. Furthermore, its utilisation of gear systems let us control its effect based on the gear ratio used – thus we might be able to introduce a “gearbox” of sorts, allowing the consumer to switch between weight classes by a simple twist of the mechanism rather than getting another stabiliser entirely.

Gap in Market

Most stabilisers in the market are either purely active or purely passive. Systems that incorporate both are very expensive: like the Arri TRINITY (US$45,000).

Problem

An passive+active system is a severely underused solution for more general problems: the active component corrects for tiny perturbations (when we zoom in into tiny movements of any situation, they all look the same), while the passive component corrects for the large random movements (which can vary very much between different situations). We can have the same active component with a different passive component depending on the use (e.g. a passive component to be used in the air might contain aerofoils).

Our Aim

We make it (modularly).