CALGARY -- Fear not, Canada. Our finest female speed skater, two-time Olympic gold medalist Catriona Le May Doan, may be leaning toward retirement but her replacement is already under construction. And let me be the first to say that our next Le May Doan looks an awful lot like a giant cockroach.
Of course, that's just an early version. Within a year or two, we may see a speed skater that looks like a toaster oven and moves like Paul Kariya. A lot will depend on what happens this Sunday at the Olympic Oval, where 600 first-year engineering design students at the University of Calgary have been asked to match programmable logic controllers and proximity sensors and go head-to-head in what is being billed as Skatebot Races: the Oval Finale. (Batteries not included.)
Skatebots, as you've probably guessed, are robotic speed-skating devices that come in three categories: those that use wheels or a paddle-wheel system, those that use a pusher-type propulsion method and those that are so weird looking they barely move but produce great gobs of laughter. For those inchworm-like slowbots, the race is not down a 14-metre stretch of the Oval ice. It's across the width of track or however far they can make it without bursting into flames.
Dr. Sean Maw is the director of engineering research at the Olympic Oval or, as he likes to call himself, "the guy responsible for all the weird projects going on around here." Maw helped come up with the notion of putting 600 engineering students in one place with the idea of building a better speed skater. The rules were simple: using a Lego Mindstorm kit complete with motors and some aluminum for skate blades, construct a skatebot that will function on its own.
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"The robots race down a lane with pads on each side," Maw explained. "If they hit the pads, the smart robots back up and carry on. These are not remote-controlled robots. They are autonomous. The dumb ones just keep hitting the pads like a dumb-ass robot."
Once again, let me be the first to say that there is nothing more pathetic than a dumb-ass robot that doesn't have the wherewithal to back up instead of driving headfirst into an object that could fall over and squash it like a bug. Speaking of which, Maw has seen most of the 150 skatebot entries that have been tested over the past few weeks and his favourite is the one that resembles a giant cockroach, the kind you couldn't kill with a nuclear warhead.
"The design was particularly amazing. It had a three-joint leg and came close to finishing the race -- but didn't. It's going in the third category [the burst-into-flames race]."
Lest you think this robotics-on-ice business is just another way to keep engineering students busy otherwise they'd be constructing high-rise apartment buildings made entirely of cheese doodles, think again. There is a useful side to this endeavour.
In the near future, robotics could help Canadian athletes train better. Cameras could be mounted on devices that would follow speed skaters around the track so coaches could study body movement and technique from different angles. The winners on Sunday will receive contracts from a University of Calgary electrical engineering professor who plans to build just such a gizmo.
"In track cycling they have a motorcycle as a pace car during training," said Maw, who was a speed skater and used to coach the sport before being hired at the Oval a year and a half ago. "If you're Jeremy Wotherspoon, there's nobody to chase because you're the fastest guy there is. Some day we should be able to develop a robot that can successfully navigate the track in a controlled fashion so that Jeremy could go faster in training using the draft."
University of Calgary engineering students have also come up with an idea for those crash-bang, fall-down short-track speed skaters. The students designed a rink pad that exceeds the safety standards currently imposed by the International Skating Union. It is hoped the new pad will be presented at next year's ISU Congress.
But first, there are skatebots to modify and races to win at an event that eventually could be expanded to include human-size robots built from auto parts and eight-track players. The future, as those wacky first-year engineering students like to say, is unlimited, which is good since our next Le May Doan currently looks like a large insect and moves a lot slower.
Let me be the last to say there are still a few bugs to work out.
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