Swimoid: a swim support system using an underwater buddy robot

Abstract

In the field of sports and athletics, it is important for athletes to recognize their own performance by themselves to gain skills effectively. Although swimming is a popular life-long sport all around the world, it is difficult for non-professional swimmers to understand how they swim. In other sports such as baseball, golf and dancing, mirrors are utilized to examine the players' form. However, it is difficult to use the mirror for this purpose when it comes to continuous sports such as swimming, running and cycling. To solve this problem, we propose a buddy robot that has an ability to recognize, follow, and present information to the swimmer. We developed a swim support system called "Swimoid". The buddy robot can swim directly under the user, and present information through the display mounted over the main body. To follow the user, we utilized image processing techniques on the footages captured by two cameras mounted on the front and rear of the robot. Swimoid can augment the user's ability underwater environments in two different ways. First of all, Swimoid enables swimmers to recognize their swimming form in real time. Secondly, Swimoid could allow coaches on the pool side to give instructions to swimmers. These two functions are for improving swimming techniques. However, we also believe we can use the buddy robot for a different purposes, such as entertaining novice swimmers and we implemented a game function to get familiar with water using the touch interaction with a swimmer. As a result of user tests, we confirmed this system works properly. Finally, we measured our contribution in the research field by comparison with related works.