Honors Capstone · 2026

CineWave

A 6-DoF robotic cinema arm: designed, machined, coded, and filmed by one person, for under $2,500.

Why I built it

Motivation

Professional 6-axis motion control sells for $50,000+ per day. I wanted to prove that a student DP could build one from scratch for under $2,500.

As a student cinematographer, I spent two years shooting on basic gimbals and dollies. These tools, however, limit you to 2 or 3 axes. Every time I storyboarded a complex camera move, I hit the same wall: real robotic motion control was priced for Marvel, not for student films.

But I wasn't just a DP. I'd already spent two years in an HRI lab engineering a 30-servo humanoid robot. I knew the motors, the control loops, the mechanical design patterns. So I asked a different question: what if I designed a cinema robot around lighter gear (an FX3 instead of an ARRI) and optimized the entire drivetrain for cost?

CineWave is the answer. I designed, assembled, and coded every part of it alone as my Honors Capstone: the capstan wrist, the harmonic drives, the CAN-FD bus, and the Unreal Engine digital twin.

CineWave in the lab, mid-assembly and testing

Lab photo

What makes it special

Engineering

< $2,500 Total BOM

Full 6-DoF arm with absolute encoders, CAN-FD bus, and carbon-fiber links, two orders of magnitude cheaper than the high-end alternatives

6 Degrees of freedom

Harmonic drives on shoulder and elbow; capstan differential wrist for the final 3 axes.

1.0 m Reach

Pultruded carbon-fiber 500 mm arm links. These are stiff, lightweight, and long enough for sweeping camera moves.

1.5 kg Payload

Designed around the Sony FX3 class of camera, an indie filmmaker's favorite: compact, cinema-capable bodies that don't need a 15 kg payload.

< 2 ms CAN-FD round-trip

Moteus controllers over CAN-FD on Raspberry Pi 5. Real-time enough for smooth, repeatable motion playback.

100+ Custom CAD parts

Every bracket, housing, and link designed in SOLIDWORKS. PA6-CF 3D-printed housings for strength at low weight.

6-DOF RENDER

Unreal Engine workspace with the digital twin and control rig

UE5 DIGITAL TWIN

PI 5 · CAN-FD

Mixed drive architecture

Harmonic drives on the high-torque shoulder and elbow joints for near-zero backlash. Capstan drives on the wrist handle the final 3 axes: lighter, cheaper, and with continuous cable tension that eliminates gear-mesh slop. That split keeps the cost down without giving up positioning precision.

Unreal Engine 5 digital twin (WIP)

A real-time digital twin built in UE5 with Control Rig IK drives the physical arm. Plan shots in virtual space, preview camera paths, and execute them on hardware. This is the same virtual production workflow used on professional sets, but running on a student's Raspberry Pi instead of a Technodolly.

Solo build

Mechanical design, electrical, embedded firmware, computer vision, the UE5 pipeline, and the cinematography: all of it done by myself through late (sometimes lonely) nights in the lab.

Honors thesis

Renée Crown Honors Program

The full engineering story is documented in my Renée Crown Honors Capstone thesis: mechanical design, kinematic analysis, control architecture, and the digital-twin pipeline.

Covers the complete design rationale for every subsystem: why capstan over planetary for the wrist, harmonic drive sizing, CAN-FD bus topology, PID tuning with gravity feedforward, and the UE5 Control Rig integration. Very nerdy, be forewarned.

Download thesis (PDF)

CineWave_Thesis.pdf

In action

UE5 sequence · Lab footage

Wrist articulation

Real-time controller support