Application Spotlight: Yaskawa Makes Skycam a Football Hero
Sports fans and broadcast pros turn to Skycam for the ultimate in speedy, smooth action footage. Learn the inside story on how this exceptional system can swivel like a running back without a shake, bobble, or missed video opportunity. Here's a clue: a Yaskawa servo system with special features that help it instantly adapt to a different stadium every week.
Transcript
00:00:11 skycam it's the eye in the sky in sports broadcasting a flying camera with the speed moves and control to rival anything on the field thanks to servo packs and servo motors from Yaskawa the technology behind sky cam may be a surprise to the fans at home but it's very familiar to the biggest sports broadcasters Fox CBS NBC ESPN ABC those are our clients they want
00:00:40 everybody on the edge of their seats and they want us to bring them there nothing excites them more than sky cams new Wildcat it moves with a speed smoothness and agility that's practically unbelievable especially when you understand how sky cam works the camera system weighs 50 pounds and hangs on cables hundreds of feet long and as thin as a pencil
00:01:03 the cables passed through four pulleys mounted at the highest point of the stadium and down to four precisely control cable reels these two systems pull in two systems have to let out to move the camera this direction now imagine that in full three-dimensional space anywhere you want to go in space all four transports all four corners have to be working together to make sure
00:01:24 the camera goes where it needs to in space if that isn't done in perfect synchronization your cable will start to pull or snag or bounce and you'll get vibrations in your shop with the old system if you went from full speed and tried to go to a dead stop the system would bounce it would come to a stop but it would bounce and wobble and you could see it in the camera well their previous
00:01:44 system you know it was I like to call it the wobble dance it just kind of like the wobble along here's the cure for the wobble dance skycams Yaskawa servo systems Ichikawa servo system has sophisticated vibration suppression technology built-in vibration suppression automatically detects every shimmy and shake canceling it out to create
00:02:05 completely smooth movement compared to the old system you know it just floats through the air and you know stops on a dime there is no movement there is no shake it just comes to stop now imagine achieving performance like this in a different stadium every weekend on live TV we could be in Houston in a 105 degrees one day and then going a couple months down we could
00:02:27 be in Minnesota and it's negative ten when we deploy these systems they have to be reliable and work we can't have harmonics develop in the middle of a game there's no time to stop and say I need to make an adjustment nobody appreciates you ask our reliability and performance more than the people who serve as Skycam pilots I always think of it as like
00:02:45 driving Herbie the lovebug an old Volkswagen compared to what we have now is more like a NASCAR and even a Formula One car because it's so much more responsive we have a running back or someone who catches the pass we can keep up with them and they can't run away from this your scours motion control systems are really what we've found to be best to breathe being able to have a
00:03:04 relationship with just skala and a partnership to where we can go to them with our needs so that we can deliver not just only the products that we need to today but have the technology or migration paths of the future has been very important to us whatever the future may bring one thing is clear wherever sports are broadcast skycam and Yaskawa will be part of the picture and
00:03:24 that's a victory for everyone [Music]