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Camera Robots that Speed Across the Room

Mar 11, 2024
hello a few months ago I went to new york to visit steve geralt's studio known as the garage or the garage as he would say he is a very successful business director and engineer and the reason I went is because he uses ghosts and

robots

for this Originally It was supposed to be a main channel video, but when I was watching all the footage, the most fascinating thing was the behind the scenes and troubleshooting, so I thought instead of it being a much shorter video focused on the main channel. In slow motion, I thought we could make a much longer and deeper second channel video and show a lot more of the process that, combined with Dan, was able to travel again.
camera robots that speed across the room
I thought I'd better do it again. the main channel and honestly this is the best format for this video so let's go to New York so what kind of things do you mainly do? We do TV commercials for food and beverage brands, mostly, it's a lot of shots of packages, a lot of liquids, a lot. lots of ghostly explosions in slow motion flows splashes collisions uh all kinds of fun stuff like that and we use the

robots

sometimes just to hold the

camera

and other times to throw and throw food it's like a robot food fight what's the most robots that you have used? once, three, three robots in one shot, that's the most I've ever used, but one day we'll have five.
camera robots that speed across the room

More Interesting Facts About,

camera robots that speed across the room...

I'm working on making five robots, so in my studio I have a bolt. This one here is a bolt. You also have a bolt. x on the track, what has surprised me most about the track is that it is powered by these little rails, but only by a small rotating gear, yes, and it is surprising that that small gear can carry so much weight, a really big motor of five horsepower there. I think or something like that, yeah that's crazy, yeah how much does the bolt weigh? He himself weighs about 2,500 pounds and then each track length is about 300 pounds, I think, and then here we have four track lengths for 40 meters, um, we have more than we could. do up to 90 meters and you can take this to whatever set you need for Austin to build it wherever we want to go, yeah, so the goal is to get the tablecloth, like many you've probably seen in other videos, under this table without doing any food will spill out and this will be a full Christmas dinner here, hams and potatoes and everything on this table along with fire and other fun things, a little fire, yes, and ideally this will go out faster than any man.
camera robots that speed across the room
I could say yes under the power background. Yes, we're using mechanical systems to help make this group really fast and using a really scary big, fast robot to keep up with the ghost before jumping into action. I thought about filming something. interesting things in the studio because they make a lot of food, there are accessories everywhere, they have a very cute dog, full-blown industrial kitchen robots that make the place dirty, they rent robots and go out on location, that's why they have so many, there's a new mac pro in this robot control car here to transcode there is another car there for a different robot some pretty interesting equipment everywhere and one of the things I discovered about their lighting setup is that they not only have power cables attached but also hoses, these are custom lights, this LED here is no different in size than the ones I use, but as you can see mine have these humongous housings for cooling and Steve's, he told me he designed them himself to be extremely small and water . cooled so you can have extremely bright lights but very close to the action and they all connect to this main unit here with a big water tank with pumps and it's just a big closed circuit that flows through all the lights and also all The lights can be controlled remotely so that they all come on at once.
camera robots that speed across the room
It's really an amazing setup to have for the first try. We wanted to see if a second robot could pull the tablecloth fast enough. We did this knowing that the second robot would probably have difficulties. move the tablecloth fast enough because in the

camera

movement we planned to accelerate the ball x at full

speed

across the track and at the same time move the arm from left to right and basically combine both

speed

s to get a very fast camera. Dan robot operator showing some of the crazy precision this bolt can move on the track even though everything is moving, it keeps the camera locked in 3D space as if it were bolted to the ground on a tripod.
I really liked talking to dan. in fact, between takes, he's very knowledgeable about robots and, uh, he's just a really nice guy, it's crazy, he doesn't even have a budget of a millimeter, right, he's pretty slick. Hello, you want to see a funny tic tac, yes, right here. Hello, browsing, yes, I think we are going. Okay, that's right, there's 30. Dan, yeah, what are you doing? I am the motion control supervisor here at Garage Rental. I find that when I use the canister I have, I'm usually at the limits of what it can do and it's just on a pedestal, so with the addition of the track we can add those two speeds together for this shot.
Yeah, so Steve came to me with this idea and said we had to make the robot move as fast as it did. possibly it can and uh as tempting as you think oh surely every time you use the bolt you have to move you know you always run at 100 speed I mean you always run it as fast as you can you'd be surprised if it moves very fast and it's not unusual to move too fast because what we're trying to do can go much faster than gravity, so sometimes, even though it can go very, very fast, we need to move, you know, a little bit slower to stay in line. with whatever we're filming, however, that's not the case in this particular situation, so as you've experienced and as some people might know, the robotic arm can move on its own pretty quickly. but imagine if you put your arm that's moving really fast on a base that's moving really fast on a track and then you get this double whammy of speed here we go kind of like this, I'm like making weird shots, yeah, and that was something.
I personally wasn't done with this system yet, so this fun little challenge where we basically dialed in the fastest linear movement on the arm first and then figured out how fast we could move the track from point a to point b and then we kind of did a a little bit of calculation and we got the track to move at speed first and then when it reached its kind of maximum speed, we moved, we got the arm to start moving, so that the arm and the track pulled out in the middle and then the arm stopped. and then the track slows down and that part where they're both moving is right on top of the table, exactly next to the table, yeah, and then at that point it's all about adjusting the timing, you know, thanks to the high... speed cameras both on our phones for bts, you know, tracking, and on the camera itself, we could say ah, it looks like it needs to be a couple of frames this way or a couple of frames that way, and We usually get it after about two or three tries, that's how we get it, I just can't get over this ham, I know dude, that's what it's like to watch a real life cartoon and then without all the food, we schedule to move the second robot to see if it could pull the tablecloth effectively, which had some mixed results, but it was time to get a little more serious, so we had the latch try to pull the tablecloth and it became sort of dinner for dogs, so you built this device.
That's right, so we had talked about this project in advance and Steve said we have to pull this tablecloth, it has to be very, very fast, so the first thing I think about is the robot, but I also think about the other thing that We use for quick movements are air cylinders and the good thing about them is that they are really powerful, but the problem I was seeing was that we need to get six feet of tablecloth out from under the table items and, uh, the longest ones. The air cylinder I have is about 20 inches long, so how am I going to be able to pull six feet or more of tablecloth with air cylinders that are short?
So what I thought about was using pulleys and therefore a pulley when using a series of pulleys. multiplies your force and usually that's used to lift something, you know, so you can pull a little bit of rope or pull a lot of rope and make something really heavy move a little bit, but the idea that I came up with was kind of of turning it around, moving a lot of pulleys and then pulling a lot of rope, so here we have six pulleys in a configuration, uh, locked with four air cylinders, so I can't pull them right now because that would ruin the configuration here. but we're going to look at some behind the scenes of how this extends and for each one as it travels the 18 inches, each of these sections pulls 18 inches, which gives us a multiplier of six right here, I think they were actually seven. seven, so seven times 18 inches just from 18 inches of travel yeah, to pin down the timing and speed, we did some test whips without any food in there, the flashing software starts the camera movement and the traction device from Matt, so it's just a matter of adjusting them the first try the camera was too early the tablecloth was still on the table for most of a take the second try the tablecloth was already removed when the camera got to the beginning of the shot table using both shots were able to split the difference and get the perfect tablecloth whip under all things, so now it's time to fully dress up the table and do it for real.
We are ready to shoot. Okay, cross your fingers. It turns on. It's fine and shoots in action. two one well there's a lot more on top completely backwards we don't see any of this off the table so that's exciting all the wine so doing it for real has given us new variables because the extra weight of the food means which starts with a slower pull and speeds up as less weight is left on the tablecloth and has worked very well. I think the only issue we had was simply an issue with the way the slack affected the way the tablecloth started to move when it had more on it. loose, it would pull the fabric more at first, that's something I didn't anticipate.
I always thought in my head, oh, if we had some slack that would allow this to speed up and then once he actually got the fabric out. If it loosens, we would see that explosive movement and eliminate some of the acceleration time, but actually what ended up happening is that when it sinks and then loosens, it has inertia and then rises because it somehow created this movement. to straighten out and then started making things mess around on the table, so starting with a completely tense line seems to be the way to go and that's something we learned from the footage from this camera, wasn't it? slightly in slow motion, but if we were behind, behind-the-scenes moving footage would really be very useful for all of these projects because there are things that we want to see on the set, but there are also things that we want to see on the set, but also how it is happening and by looking at that we can simply figure out how things work well and how they don't, for example in the prototype above we discovered that one side of the air pistons in the cylinders has to work harder than the other, so He was beginning to lean a little. little bit started to twist and probably get stuck on itself, so we ended up putting linear guides here to keep it square that way these rods wouldn't start to twist in the cylinders and decelerate a lot of weight here to keep it from going anywhere, yeah, I guess without the weight you end up with this somewhere out there, yeah, we tried it by putting weight in different places and then we found out like, oh, it's moved and of course one of the benefits of this whole system is that the robot can tell when it should run, yes exactly, so this whole setup is powered by 60 volts DC which the torch computer controls via a relay, so we can control exactly when this valve. opens in the timeline in coordination with the robot's movements now we had we wanted to program a new robot movement that looks down over the table excellent, it's terrifying, I mean let's be fair to take down Steve and I thought We joined together and tried to remove the tablecloth ourselves.
What are the chances of us doing this by hand? uh none. I'm pretty sure it's not going to work, but we should try it anyway. Yeah, I think it's beautiful and Let's do a shake on the floor, yeah, okay, yeah, let's try it guys, ready, here we go and three, two, one, we're well synchronized, though yeah, I'm impressed, we are professionals. You know, if you're looking that many times and because our human whip didn't do much damage to the table, we thought we'd end up in a big mess, oh my gosh, that's amazing, it's still like it's still on the table, oh gosh. mine.
God, everything lives, yes, there it is, oh God, oh, look at the jelly, ohOh my god, that's amazing, that's like 400 feet, well there we go, I hope you enjoyed that look into the fascinating world of people who are at the absolute top of their game. I really enjoyed being in that creative environment and meeting all those people. It was great, thanks to Steve Jarrell and the team, as well as Mark Roberts Motion Control for organizing that trip. Thanks so much for looking. Make sure you subscribe and we'll see you next time bye

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