Frozen Triumph: Lessons from GARMI's Bimanual Trophy Handover at the Kandahar Ski World Cup - Shaping Current Research Directions

Abstract

This paper presents GARMI’s successful outdoor demonstration during the Kandahar Ski World Cup, where it performed trophy handovers in sub-zero temperatures. The event highlighted challenges in deploying robots in extreme conditions, including fluctuating temperatures and uneven terrain. GARMI achieved and completed the trophy handover during the live event, streamed to 60 million viewers. This experience raised two key research questions: the feasibility of high-precision robotics in harsh weather and strategies to compensate for environmental effects. To address them, we extended our previous framework to estimate the mass of the lifted trophy in real-time, incorporating IMU data and conducting experiments under varying temperatures and orientations. Experimental results showed that even slight variations in the robot’s base orientation had a significant impact on the accuracy of mass estimation. For instance, a 5° tilt in the robot’s base orientation resulted in a more than 100% increase in mass estimation error. Online mass estimation, performed using a quasi-static model, demonstrated improved accuracy when incorporating IMU-based corrections for base orientation. Additionally, temperature variations were found to affect robot control performance, with tracking errors increasing outside the manufacturer’s recommended temperature range. The findings highlighted the need for real-time corrections and compensations for base orientation and temperature in robot dynamics, ensuring safe human-robot interaction.