SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR BALANCING A GIMBALED SYSTEM

A method of balancing a gimbaled system having a gimbal operatively connected with a motor configured to control a rotation of the gimbal, wherein the gimbal has predetermined compensation locations thereon. The method includes tumbling the gimbal through a gravity field using the motor, sensing motor control current data from the motor, applying a polynomial fit filter to the motor control current data to produce smoothed current data, determining from the smoothed current data an imbalance condition of the gimbal characterized by an imbalance torque and an imbalance angle, and applying an optimization algorithm to determine an optimized combination of one or more compensating weights disposed at one or more of the predetermined compensation locations, wherein the optimized combination is effective to compensate for the imbalance condition. A system for balancing the gimbaled system is al so disclosed.