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Man has reached the limit of his body in sports, but robots have not. Understanding how technology will change sports in the coming decades
What has already changed
Rocket League and Street Fighter V esports tournaments were held in Tokyo ahead of the Summer Olympic Games – the International Olympic Committee approved the holding of esports competitions as part of the largest sports event for the first time. The Olympics itself is marked by an abundance of robotic mechanisms: robotic waiters and assistant robots replace part of the staff, special exoskeletons help people carry heavy loads, and drone buses transport athletes and staff.
At the same time, technologies were introduced into the preparation of athletes for competitions several years ago. In 2016, for example, sports brand Puma introduced a running robot. It looks like a small cart that rides ahead of the athlete, motivating him to run faster. The robot follows a clearly defined trajectory, shows the speed of the runner and recognizes the start and finish lines. A year earlier, OMRON Industrial Automation Vietnam, a technology company, developed a robot trainer to practice table tennis skills. Thanks to artificial intelligence, he can track the trajectory of the ball and even predict the opponent’s blows.
Technological devices not only help people, but also compete in fights. The Drone Racing League, an international league for racing drones, holds competitions in which drones fly around various obstacles at a speed of more than 140 km/h. As in computer games, only in reality, there are battles between robots: for example, in 2017, a duel took place between the robot of the American company MegaBots and the Japanese Suidobashi Heavy Industry. Their size turned out to be more than four meters in height, and people were sitting inside the robots – just like they show in science fiction films.
In a word, technology has already seriously changed sports and sports – what will happen next?
Robot battle
In the future, the concept of sport will be expanded to include many more competitions and games, believes Konstantin Frumkin, coordinator of the Russian Association of Futurologists. In his opinion, thanks to technology, sports can develop in such formats as e-sports and robot battles. In the latter direction, devices will physically compete, but in fact, development teams.
According to Frumkin, there is a huge field for the development of quasi-sports, because robots are becoming more diverse, which means that more competitions can be devised with them.
“You can imagine racing on unmanned vehicles, a battle of robots. Since every sport develops according to differentiation, division of categories (for example, for wrestlers these are weight categories), then sports for robots will be divided into types of equipment. Competitions for robots will be limited by the weight of mechanisms, by energy intensity, by the number of limbs in robots, by their ability to fly, swim, and so on, ”says the futurologist. As the expert notes, such competitions are already taking place and can be scaled up in the next ten years.
If you look at a more distant perspective, then in the next 20-30 years competitions in space will develop. According to Konstantin Frumkin, such a sport can become popular when people and companies have their own private satellites.
Robots with reservations
However, the question of the robotization of sports should be looked at critically – such competitions as the director Shawn Levy shows us in the film Real Steel, the robots that exist today are still far away. Competitions with anthropomorphic robots today are more like a testing ground for debugging technologies, notes Andrey Smirnov, technical director of the ROBBO Club. According to him, although in the real world we are surrounded by many robots, such as washing machines, there are not so many anthropomorphic robots that can fit into the human environment. “Anthropomorphic robot, which was described by science fiction writers, must interact with a person in a natural environment. For example, he must be able to climb stairs. To do this, you need to create mechanisms on two legs, with two arms, and so on, that is, with parameters that are not inferior to a person, ”says the expert. According to him, today there are no robots that are identical in parameters with a person anywhere in the world.
There are several reasons why robots today cannot compete with humans in running, swimming and other activities. First of all, because anthropomorphic robots are too heavy. If artificial intelligence has advanced a lot over the past ten years – there are already robots with vision that can navigate in space, for example, in autopilots – then the mechanics of robots are still not sufficiently developed. “The mechanics of such robots is quite expensive, because there is little demand for them, so it is problematic to work on its improvement,” says Smirnov. The most expensive part of such a robot is the servo, which costs thousands of dollars, which can make the robot itself cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. “So far, human and animal muscles are more efficient than metal mechanisms. I hope that within 50 years there will be a transition from mechanisms made of metal to technologies similar to the structure of a human body with muscles,” says Andrey Smirnov.
Development of BioTech
A separate area in sports can be the introduction of technology into your own body. Already today there is an important intermediate stage – prosthetics. But an advanced prosthesis is a robot sitting in a human body. Modern biotechnological prostheses can replace almost all parts of the body. For example, the ProCarve sports prosthesis, consisting of a knee joint and a foot, is suitable for skiing and snowboarding; Otto Bock’s bionic knee allows people to participate in power sports and run after knee replacement. The Paralympic Games can become a place of application of new technologies. “With the help of an artificial leg, a person can run not only faster than ordinary runners. In modern conditions, this cannot be applied in sports, but you can create special competitions, a category of competitions for people with artificial arms, legs, a rewired artificial heart, etc. Such competitions are already being held, they are called cyber-athletics, ”says Frumkin.
Biotechnologies are also developing in the field of doping. According to the futurologist, although it is now banned, in fact it is a kind of chemical improvement of the human body. Therefore, it is quite possible that in the next ten years there may be separate types of competitions for people with doping and for athletes without it.
Sports in virtual reality
Another technological trend in sports is virtual reality. VR stimulators are already training professional athletes, says Nomix CEO Arkady Overin (the company specializes in solving business problems using VR technologies). “For example, with their help football teams Paris Saint-Germain, Manchester United, Arsenal train goalkeepers,” says the expert.
According to Overin, eSports is also developing with the use of virtual reality technologies, thanks to which VR games will be able to enter world competitions. “There is such a precedent: the developers of the video game “Racket: Nx” (a game of racquetball in virtual reality. — Trends) applied to the International Racquetball Federation with a request to include their game in the Olympic Games. The very fact of filing such an application indicates how far VR technologies have spread in sports,” the expert says.
However, such technologies can be useful for a person not only within the framework of big-time sports. The Zwift app has already gained popularity – it is an online game for cyclists, runners and triathletes that allows you to train and compete in a virtual world.
When computer corporations begin to mass-produce VR glasses, and they become more affordable for the consumer, including in price, people will actively use them for physical training, believes Arkady Overin. “Thanks to artificial intelligence and VR, a person will be able to exercise remotely with a personal trainer, and with the help of technology, he will be able to control the correctness of the exercises performed, and so on. In general, augmented reality can perfectly diversify sports activities: running in the gym on a treadmill, a person will be able to feel like in a large stadium with virtual avatars of friends or rivals – this motivates to exercise, ”says the expert.
The future of sports
Experts are sure that despite the development of technology, robots are unlikely to be able to displace humans from stadiums. Most likely, human sports familiar to us, e-sports, competitions between robots will develop in their own directions. “Culture is now becoming mosaic, any kind of spectacle attracts a circle of lovers, but this circle is not dominant. Now not everyone watches football and hockey. I think people will watch different sports and play different sports in thirty and fifty years, ”says Konstantin Frumkin.
Andrey Smirnov recalls that people lost chess to a computer many years ago, nevertheless, chess as a sport has not changed: it is still more interesting for a person to measure intelligence with another person, and not with a computer. “In the same way, people compete in running with each other and do not try to overtake a motorcycle that was created by man and sharpened to solve one problem – to go fast,” says Smirnov.
The question of the fate of major sporting events remains open. According to Frumkin, they are in “a slow, almost imperceptible crisis and extinction.”
“The crisis is connected with the fact that a person has reached the limit of his body. The organizers of sports competitions tried to get around this phenomenon both by increasing the number of sports categories (for example, weight), and by reducing the units of measurement – from seconds they moved to hundredths and thousandths of a second. Now it is pointless to do this, ”the expert says. Complicating the situation of sport is the possibility of doping, or rather, the chemical masking of doping in human biomaterial. All this, says Konstantin Frumkin, calls into question the meaning of big sport. “There is no escape from these facts. Some of the organizers of sporting events will deny the crisis in sports and put up with a drop in interest in it, while others will look for new marketing solutions to promote big-time sports,” the futurist sums up.