Check out James Bruton's robotic camera operator

Check out James Bruton's robotic camera operator

Arduino Team — December 16, 2022

We're a long way from the days when a YouTuber could get away with sloppy camerawork. If someone wants to be successful in making videos today, they need near-professional camera equipment. But even this equipment is not enough if it is still used for static shots. Many manufacturers build sliders and other rigs, but James Bruton skipped those small steps and went straight to a versatile robotic camera operator.

Bruton wanted to capture dynamic video any time of the day or night without hiring a live camera operator and this robot is the result. He can drive and has full control over the mounted DSLR camera. He can follow pre-programmed movement patterns, can use tracking to stay focused on Bruton, or a combination of the two to change perspective while staying focused on Bruton. It can also zoom in and out automatically based on movement to ensure everything of interest is in frame. Bruton can even trigger additional features using foot pedals, such as raising a robotic thumb in the frame.

This robot is quite complex and Bruton's video focuses on functionality rather than hardware details, but he tells us that the robot has both an Arduino Mega 2560 development board and an NVIDIA Jetson Nano single board computer. . The Arduino handles the low-level control of the motors, while the Jetson does the heavy computer vision processing. The base of the robot contains three motorized omni-directional wheels, so it can roll smoothly in any direction. The camera mount pans and tilts, and a servo spins the zoom ring. Bruton 3D printed most of the robot's physical parts, with just a handful of aluminum extrusions for the vertical structure. With this robot in his arsenal, we expect Bruton's videos to be much more dynamic in the future