Robot Skiing

If you are growing bored waiting for the skilled Olympic skiers in PyeongChang to crash and fall, you need to switch gears and watch the robot skiing event! While robots may be pretty good at driving us around and waging war, skiing is still beyond most of them. 

The video comes from the Ski Robot Challenge in South Korea outside of PyeongChang 2018 yesterday. This week’s robot ski event was held at the Welli Hilli resort in Hoenseong, about an hour’s drive from the actual Olympic games.

And there are few things funnier than robots falling down. The last DARPA Robotics Challenge in 2015 was great for robot fail videos and GIFs. But humanity has largely been deprived of hilarious robotic failures in the past couple of years. We’ve mostly been faced with the terrifying reality of robot backflips and super-human agility.

This is great on so many levels. We can enjoy the slapstick aspect without worrying about painful injuries. We can laugh at the attempts to make these robots resemble human skiers without getting it quite right. Most importantly, we can comfort ourselves about the ability of killer robots to catch us in the snow during the robot uprising.