Robots on Ice 2024

What do robots and ice have in common? Probably not much, but thanks to Sarah Feldman who put together her interest in ice skating with her interest in robotics, we have an annual Robots on Ice event in the San Francisco Bay Area in the USA. We participated in the third edition of the event last year, and this year, we took our Bittle robots again to the Robots on Ice 2024 at the Yerba Buena Ice Skating rink in San Francisco, CA.

The event, like the ones in previous years is a mix of free play of robots on the ice rink, and performances by professional and amateur ice skaters. Both me and my son look forward to this event each year, because we can put our robots and their skills in front of an audience. Besides, it is a cool place to check out amateur robots created by high school teams and companies alike. As an example, this year we saw the Boston Dynamics Spot, and Bittle had a nice time dancing with Spot, as can be seen in the following video.

Ice is also an amazing surface to test out robots, because the friction is different from the ground. What makes it more interesting is that you would typically not have a chance to prepare your robot on ice… so you need to be ready to show off your robot on ice in your first attempt. With our Bittle, we tried to make it bounce, crawl, step, and slide. Sliding was a lot of fun… we could make Bittle run fast, and then make him stop, thus causing him to slide. A couple of times Bittle lost balance and fell, but could recover nicely. You can see some of these cute moves in our videos below.

There were also a number of fun moments with other robots, such as when our Bittle got stuck and a fellow robot brought it back. There are also booths set up by robot exhibitors were you could mingle and ask questions.

In summary, Robots On Ice is a great event, and we hope that this concept can be taken to other cities. If you live around the San Francisco Bay, try to see if you can come to next years’ event. Children need to come in close contact to a robot, so that they can see it function in real life. At some point, we hope that a humanoid robot can come and show how it can skate on nice…that will be a great test for technological evolution of humanoid robots.

We hope you liked the videos of Bittle on ice. We will keep posting more videos at our X profile. We also look forward to your questions and comments, please keep posting them.