Autonomous Driving on Ice

A Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute research team is bringing autonomous driving to the ice rink — see how they add autonomous capabilities to a two-Zamboni-machine convoy.

"The connection with the Penguins and Zamboni was made for us by local autonomous trucking spinoff, Locomation, and has led to a great project of the type our program seeks, with strong systems engineering, electromechanical, sensing and programming/control aspects," said John Dolan  , a principal systems scientist in the RI and adviser on the project. "It is a good example of how human-guided autonomous driving technology can be used in nonroadway domains."

Transcript

00:00:00 an mrsd student team from Carnegie mellon's robotics Institute dubbed AI on Ice has partnered with three organizations to add autonomous capabilities to a two Zamboni machine Convoy locomation a CMU spin out company focused on bringing human-guided autonomy to long-haul Trucking at scale Zamboni the company founded in 1949 that

00:00:23 created the world's first self-propelled ice resurfacing machine and the Pittsburgh Penguins share the goal of using artificial intelligence to improve the consistency of ice in the rink the CMU team is working on a two-zamboni machine convoy system inspired by locomation's autonomous relay Convoy model where a human operates the lead machine followed by an electronically

00:00:46 tethered autonomous Zamboni machine that duplicates the speed and direction of the leader for the purposes of ice resurfacing the follower machine will follow offset to improve the efficiency of the ice resurfacing while decreasing the time needed to complete the process after a semester of upfront design work and system planning the team was ready to test their AI in the spring of 2022

00:01:09 using a radio controlled car and a ugv developed by Clearpath robotics using the demonstration Vehicles they fine-tune their software and experimented with different sensors and actuators on a smaller more manageable scale than that of a five ton Zamboni machine now with the vehicle provided by Zamboni the team has performed on-site testing at the UPMC Lemieux Sports

00:01:30 Complex during the Project's development the Penguins invited the AI on Ice team to watch a game against the Florida hurricanes for four members of the team it was their first hockey game and first time seeing a Zamboni machine in action so yeah that was our final demo yeah maybe after you can just go out and show you the other okay yep sounds good great thank you