UMKC team designs winning wireless stage equipment

When the original road company of “Phantom of the Opera” came to Jim Smith’s hometown in 1989 to put on a show, there were problems with the radio controls that moved the gondola. To keep it from jumping into the orchestra pit, they hired Smith to fix it.

Now the next generation of Smiths are getting their chance to put wireless magic to work on a stage. And, not surprisingly, the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s stage crew is the best around.

Smith went on to form a company, RC4, and sponsors a challenge for student teams to show what they can do when asked to design and build a moving stage platform. Smith loans parts worth about $10,000 to each team, with the promise that the winner may keep the finished product.

From the many schools taking up the challenge, three made it through the first round. UMKC’s team were graduate students in the technical direction program taught by Chuck Hayes and Chaz Bell. Purdue University and the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music were the other schools in the running. Each school had a unique take on the design and capabilities of the platform, and every team’s entry was capable of more than the minimum requirements.

But UMKC did them one better. Their “Roo-bot” automated platform, a little 4-foot-by-4-foot workhorse, used RC4 Wireless’ new RC6 Wireless Motion system to its fullest. And it stood a mere 4¼” off the stage.

“Typically theatrical automation is limited to linear or rotational motion,” said Bell. “With wireless technology, you can make complex moves and rotate the unit to present different sides to the audience. We’re already looking at incorporating the machine into some of our productions next season.”

After they were named finalists, Bell’s students gave up their weekends, refining their basic plan until the equipment arrived and they installed it. They had the wiring diagrams ahead of time; and when the kit arrived, it was so user-friendly that they had the parts in place and the Roo-bot up and running in an hour. Finalists also had to create a video explaining the design and demonstrating the range of motion.

Smith said all the teams did a great job of imagining ways that an untethered stage-automation platform could be used, but UMKC “set a new bar for how low-profile and versatile a platform of this kind can be.”

Judges were Ian Phillips, head of automation at the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario, and Loren Schreiber, technical director and professor at the School of Theatre, Television and Film at San Diego State University. They remarked on the sophisticated performance level coming from such a diminutive machine.

On the eight-minute video, a tester standing atop the Roo-bot took it through tight corners and moved effortlessly down a twisting path lined with 2X4s. At its noisiest, the Roo-bot resembled the interior of a car in light traffic. It reached speeds of four feet per second, and took an upright passenger for a spinning ride that could only be described as one-half of a waltzing couple.

Bell said it was not a matter of reinvention as much as it was reconfiguring and getting more out of the same set of controls. Teams were expected to improve the power, accuracy, speed and noise level of the machine, all in a smaller package. The motors and controls are extremely useful in the basic configuration; but the technology is so flexible, it can be incorporated into other machine designs to perform different tasks.

Bell acted as advisor to students Kaleb Krahn, Logan Schoenbaechler, Chris Stepanek, Adam Terry, Chris Winnemann, Patti Goebel and Adam Raine.

“They designed this platform themselves and they put so much work into it,” he said. “I am so proud of them.”