Beyond any doubt, on the threshold of 21st century Robotic engineering and designing are becoming two of the most innovative fields to work on and the robotics industry has already reached $40 billion worldwide. Robots have already implemented in our daily lives, opening the way to the future’s transformation into an artificial intelligence world, the Olympic Games included. In Tokyo 2020 Games, the honor didn’t go only to athletes but to the host as well by showcasing its cutting-edge robotic technology achievements and expertise. It occurred through the initiative called the Tokyo 2020 Robot Project, which was organized by the Tokyo Organizing Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games, in partnership with robots’ experts, the Japanese government, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government and partners of the Tokyo 2020 Games, such as Toyota (Liu Sophia, 2021). The aim of the initiative was to display the improvements of robots in their practical real-life deployment helping people along with their future possibilities.
Get to know the 4 robots
The most renown ones were the official mascots, the blue colored, Miraitowa and the pink colored, Somety. They interacted with people, welcomed, greeted athletes, and had a variety of expressions. They were designed to appeal especially to children and the cameras mounted on their foreheads let them recognize when people were nearby so as to respond with facial expressions, head nods and blinking eyes.
Another smart robot equipped by Japan was a virtual mobility robot embedded with a camera on top of a display, called T-TR1. Its purpose was to allow to people interact with the athletes, giving them the opportunity to feel like being there.
The robot which was being developed the longest period and its size looks like humans’, is called T-HR3. Its purpose was to bring the Games to those who were absent in Games-related locations by mirroring the physical movements of their human remote “handlers”.
Last but not least, part of the robot team is the Field Support Robot (FSR) which is an autonomously driving machine which can self-navigate. They were used during field events in athletics to retrieve balls, juveniles, and other stuff.
What’s next?
Nobody can foresee the unpredictable future, but the only thing we are pretty sure about is that robots have not only integrated in our daily lives but in some cases have replaced us. Japan Olympic games were clearly the most innovative games ever, hosted by one of the most high-tech cities in the world and illustrated us the full potential capabilities of these intelligent machines in the facilitation of organizing a huge sport event. Tokyo robots showed the world how seriously prepared are for the robot revolution. The big question that remains is ‘will Robolympics (competition between robots) become an actual thing?’. Τhat remains to be seen, but I personally believe that this day is not-too-distant future, as Olympics have always been a catalyst for innovation. And The following video verifies it…..
References
https://olympics.com/tokyo-2020/en/news/robots-tokyo-2020-olympics-athletics-fsr-field-events
https://olympics.com/tokyo-2020/en/news/new-robots-unveiled-for-tokyo-2020-games
https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2021/06/meet-the-robots-of-the-tokyo-olympics/
Very interesting article, Georgios! I’m a big sports fan myself so robots being part of the Olympic Games certainly didn’t go unnoticed to anyone.
In my opinion, Robolympics is not that far away as you said. It is certainly possible to design robots in such way so that they overcome the normal world and olympic records set by actual people, with outstanding differences. By taking advantage of Machine Learning techniques robots will be able to continuously improve their performance. For example, a video that went viral recently was a competition between a robot and an athlete of American football, when kicking a ball. The robot didn’t just easily beat the athlete because of its power, but the designers of the robot tried to also make it kick the ball as long as they could.
However close the Robolympics may be though, I believe that it will be a different kind of competition, which will have a lot of different features than the traditional sports competitions. One certain feature that will always distinguish robots and athletes is the emotions when competing. Athletes can show different kind of emotions during a competition or when achieving their goal, whatever this may be, when performing. Some of the most famous sports pictures that are inscribed to fans’ memories are the pictures that show the pure emotion of athletes, such as crying from happiness, celebrating or even being devastated when failing to achieve their goals. Sports fans usually tend to like or even idolise some of the athletes due to their on and off competition behaviour.
The point that I would like to make by all of the above is that even if the robots are capable of achieving extreme records by totally outperforming traditional athletes, I believe that traditional sports will never be replaced by robots because of the human feelings and emotions that play a big role in forming and completing the sports culture.