The header image for this post is a photograph of Randy Park, a practicing engineer from Hamilton, and Randy’s portable rock-throwing robot, called SweepTracker, which he constructed himself in order to conduct research on the forces involved in curling and, more specifically, the changes to those forces when a stone was brushed.
In this IEEE Spectrum article by freelance journalist Elie Dolgin, Elie takes a look at some of the technologies now being used in the sport of curling. My own conversation with Elie included such things as smart glasses for weight judgment in brushing, instrumented brushes, artificial intelligence and machine learning, robotics, and analytics. Myself, Sean Maw of the University of Saskatchewan, Curling Canada’s Mick Lizmore from London, and Emily Zacharias of Winnipeg were just a few of the researchers from around the globe that Elie interviewed for this article. It’s a really good read.Â
