Gymnastics May Be Judged By A Self-Driving Car Technology At 2020 Olympics

Operating as a radar, Light Detection and Ranging or Lidar is one of the latest technologies developed by Fujitsu to calculate the distance for self-driving cars. Now, this self-driving car technology has been found its efficiency into another application field: support for the judgment in gymnastics competitions.

As a technology firm headquartered in Japan, Fujitsu has realized Lidar’s high accuracy and speed when using it in self-driving cars; and now, the company keeps expanding the application scope of Lidar to ensure the fair judgment in gymnastics competitions. It is likely that Fujitsu’s product will be used to give the official judgments in the coming time, instead of the human judges.

As we all know, in each competition, judges always have the responsibility to supervise each movement that needs accuracy and complexity at all levels in a few minutes. However, a lot of possible factors are reasons for them to give a wrong decision, such as bad viewing angle or judgment error or eye blink. The competition result with the large error doesn’t meet any satisfaction from both losers and audiences.

With the support of Lidar, Fujitsu hopes to enhance the fairness as well as offer the most exact results for such these competitions. The technology bounces light pulses at an object and measures the object’s reflection to determine distance. Besides, the judges can deploy it to capture 3D images of the human’s body, and therefore, analyze and score what the athlete has done in each minute.

According to Fujitsu’s official revelation, images generated by Lidar can be accurate enough to evaluate joint angles in a centimeter. However, it is considered as a tool to support judges. Artificial intelligence technology may be used to integrate into the scoring process that will be completely automatic in the future.

Fujitsu plans to bring this tech to the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) World Cup for the first trial in 2019 and complete the automatic scoring process in 2020. It may become an efficient tool at the 2020 Olympics held in Tokyo, Japan.