Development of a Humanoid Robot for the 2018 Ski Robot Challenge

We describe in this paper, the development of a humanoid robot for the 2018 Ski Robot Challenge, which was held in Korea. The goal of this competition was to develop a humanoid robot that could autonomously perform in a ski giant slalom game. To participate in this competition, we developed the humanoid robot RoK-2 which is designed to ski on a slope. The lower body joints of the robot were developed to have high torque because it needed to perform ski motions in a situation where shock and vibration would occur. The upper body of the robot was designed to be shielded from factors that could damage electronic components such as snow. The ski robot required a ski turning mechanism so that it could make its way between the ski flags on the slope. To perform the turns accurately, a ski plate for the desired radius was selected and the robot performed a proper, humanlike motion using the extension-flexion a motion of carved turn. To verify the stability of the motion, we confirmed that the zero-moment point (ZMP) of the robot was within a support polygon of the robot. The environment of a ski slope is not good for image processing because of the changing light and weather. To overcome this problem, a deep learning based ski flag recognition algorithm was developed so that the robot could recognize ski flags correctly. Finally, RoK-2 was verified in the 2018 Ski Robot Challenge.