What if you could point the GoPro on your FPV by tilting your head up or down? You can do that with an open source head tracking gimbal by Medlin Drones. Here’s a video of the gimbal in action, and a sample video of what this is possible with this gimbal system.
One of the limitations of traditional FPV is that the FPV camera has a fixed angle. The same is true for a GoPro or other camera that you mount on it. What if you could control the tilt of both the FPV camera and your GoPro with your head movement? Josh from Medlin Drones has designed a single-axis gimbal that can do that. Here’s the head tracking gimbal in action:
Here’s another sample video of what is possible with this type of system:
Josh said that the head tracking gimbal was inspired by invisible 360 drones such as StanFPV’s Cine Bird (reviewed here). In that regard, I have a lot of experience with 360 drones, and I find this gimbal intriguing.
An invisible 360 drone would make it easier to frame your shot exactly the way you want. On the other hand, a GoPro will have about 4x higher resolution than a reframed video from a 360 camera drone. More importantly, the head tracking gimbal also controls the FPV camera tilt, which can make it possible to fly down (or up) with greater precision. When I’m descending, I often worry if I’m going to hit something. I imagine this system might make it easier to fly when there are a lot of obstacles above and below the drone, such as when Josh was flying inside the tree canopy.
I do have some questions about it. Besides being harder to frame than a 360 drone, I’m also wondering whether having head tracking could make it harder to fly the drone. I wonder also how this could be integrated with a 180-degree stabilized gimbal like the Spydr MOJO. In any case, I think this head tracking gimbal is a clever and potentially revolutionary idea for FPV in general.
Josh said the design is open source, but they will also sell kits and BNF drones with gimbals on their website.
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