Can a Robot Shoot an Olympic Recurve Bow? A preliminary study

The field of robotics, and more especially humanoid robotics, has several established competitions with research oriented goals in mind. Challenging the robots in a handful of tasks, these competitions provide a way to gauge the state of the art in robotic design, as well as an indicator for how far we are from reaching human performance. The most notable competitions are RoboCup, which has the long-term goal of competing against a real human team in 2050, and the FIRA HuroCup league, in which humanoid robots have to perform tasks based on actual Olympic events. Having robots compete against humans under the same rules is a challenging goal, and, we believe that it is in the sport of archery that humanoid robots have the most potential to achieve it in the near future. In this work, we perform a first step in this direction. We present a humanoid robot that is capable of gripping, drawing and shooting a recurve bow at a target 10 meters away with considerable accuracy. Additionally, we show that it is also capable of shooting distances of over 50 meters.