Japanese Researchers Create Skiing Robot

An anonymous reader writes "In a bid to better understand the art of an effective ski turn researchers have recently built a robot to simulate the exact movements of a skier. The team of researchers from Kanazawa University in Japan built the ski robot to investigate the existing movements of skier's turns and see if there is any room for improvement on current techniques."

Comments

Ski instructors know the art already...

[grrrl]

It's interesting that they need to "decipher" the art of skiing - ask a good ski instructor and they can easily tell you about a lot of optimal body positioning, angles, joint movements etc, to be a great skier. That said, perhaps this is for improving already great skiers... but if they are trying to investigate even more precise angles etc, will a robot really deliver the correct data if it's not anatomically correct? If the center of mass of the robot body is different to a human, surely the angles of the joints and the base of support of the robot for optimal performance will be different to a real person??

It's also strange that they state "the researchers also programmed a motion plan based on the skiing style of world cup racer Gaku Hirasawa, who turns his waist to face inside the turn arc" when I was taught (while learning to instruct, under the Canadian method) that your feet must initiate the turn, and the body then follows (there should be upper/lower body separation).

Anyway, interesting... crazy Japanese, they really don't get enough props for loving robots so much!

Re:Japan

[MichaelSmith]

Michael Crichton had this bit in (I think) Terminal Man where a company was being paid to develop an automated ping pong playing robot. It was called HAPP (Hopelessly Articulated Ping Pong player). The speculation was that the researchers were being paid to develop a short range ballistic defence system without actually knowing the real objective.

Building a humanoid skiing robot may deliver insights into how humans keep their balance. Maybe there is a new angle on hydroplane surface vessels with active suspension here.