Creating the perfect model
These model ‘villages’ contain some of the world’s most famous landmarks as well as a series of life-size, interactive animatronic models. But at the heart of these animatronic models is a bespoke control system that Underwoods helped to configure, and this is what brought this adventurous engineering project to life.
The individual animatronics were controlled by a series of relays and motor controllers that were housed in numerous ‘slave’ cabinets that sit under podiums at various points throughout the attraction. MP3 audio repeaters were also integrated into the control system to create the audio effects for each animatronic model.
All of the slave cabinets were connected via a comprehensive network to the master cabinet that included an OMRON NJ Series PLC which combines Vision, Motion and Logic control into a single device and is programmed on a single comprehensive software package.