HGL's unique mix of skills and enthusiasms were needed on a project to develop the next generation of remotely-operated TV studio camera platforms. These camera control heads, traditionally operated using RS-232 serial links, can move in pan, tilt, zoom and focus axes, and must move sufficiently smoothly to allow for movement from one position to another while transmitting broadcast-quality images.

HGL Dynamics was selected by the customer because of our experience in software design and development and our experience of interfacing with hardware. The system was designed to operate over Ethernet, storing all camera positions (shots) in an SQL database. Multiple touch-screen user control stations can select shots from the database and command the cameras to move to their new positions.

The sophistication of the design allows sequences of shots to be played in turn, causing the camera to move continuously from one position, through others, to a final position. Also, multiple cameras may be commanded to move simultaneously, starting and finishing their movements together. In addition, users could override a programmed move by adding extra movement via a manual joystick interface. This required recalculating the movement profile of the cameras in real time.

This project consisted of a logistical problem-solving system to find the minimum flow route for specific pieces of information between connected nodes which were capable of receiving and storing various types of information. The system was pre-programmed with an XML-based description of the various nodes present in the simulation of a large and complex organisation, together with a description of what forms of information could be transmitted from one node to another.

Given this information, the system was then required to solve the minimum journey distance (in terms of number of nodes traversed) for a given piece of information to reach a specified destination node from a user-supplied starting node.