5 Drone-Specific Events for Japan’s 2020 Robot Olympics

By now you have probably heard that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe wants to field a “Robot Olympics” in tandem with the 2020 Summer Olympics which will be held in Tokyo.

And why not? In 2016, Switzerland is hosting the first ever “Cyborg Olympics,” so why not take the idea one step further? There are plenty of robots that would lend themselves nicely to such a competition: Robot Soccer has been an organized sport since 1997 and there are robots out there that can run faster than you, swim faster than you, jump higher than you and even play ping pong better than you.

A Robot Olympics would be just as much about the machines as the teams that build them, and it would shed more light on all the awesome advancements being made in the field of robotics.

Here are some ideas the Dronelife team came up with for drone-specific events in the 2020 Robot Olympics:

Weightlifting: One of the limitations of drone technology is payload weight. Making a competition out of designing the strongest drone could prove as useful as it is fun. Plus, you could break it into categories just like real competitive weightlifting – separate classes for quadcopters, hexacopters and octocopters, or classes by weight (drones that weigh under 10 pounds and over 10 pounds) or by diameter (no more than one foot across, a yard across etc.).

Sort of like this but with more than an eight pound weight:

Synchronized Flying: Like synchronized swimming but in the air. For example…

Shot Put: This one would probably take more than one drone to execute properly, as demonstrated in the video below. (Not to mention a regulation ball and net). But, if someone could figure out how to get a single drone to sling a ball like that, the rules could change… Or, better yet, design a single drone that spins really fast and launches a projectile using the momentum it creates! Drone-Discus!

Ping Pong: I know I already said robots can play ping pong but those machines are stationary. I’m stealing from Raffaello D’Andrea’s TED Talk again to demonstrate how awesome a drone versus drone ping pong match would be:

Racing: This one is obvious, right? An all out ‘sprint’ would determine the fastest drone, an obstacle course would test speed as well as agility and a relay race could add the challenge of passing of a baton to another drone mid-flight.

Of course, all of these events (except maybe the weightlifting) would feature fully autonomous drones. So not only would developers have to design physically superior hardware, but advanced sensors and ‘brains’ for their flying robots which, again, would add a layer of practicality to all the work that would go into these drones.

What do you think? Are there other robot olympics events UAVs would be well-suited for? Let us know in the comments.