The fierce competition of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics is at its peak, and athletes are making every effort to win medals. Modern sports competition is synonymous with advanced technology, especially at this very Winter Olympic Games. Here are some highlights of the scientific and technological achievements of HUST that are sparkling in the Olympics.

Complete sets of intelligent equipment in processing ice and snow

Smart skate grinders and ski grinders

For a long time, China’s ice and snow sports equipment manufacturing industry was relatively backward compared with developed countries, with only a few manufacturers producing simple skate sharpening holders and grinders. Due to the low technical content and automation of this equipment, the grinding quality of ice knives and snowboards was insufficient to meet the requirements. Therefore, it was imperative to develop complete sets of equipment with independent intellectual property rights.

With great efforts, the National Nc System Engineering Technology Research Center of HUST and Wuhan Huazhong Numerical Control Co., Ltd. and other units developed intelligent skate grinders and ski grinders, which meet the manufacturing and grinding requirements of various ice and snow sports equipment，such as skates for speed skating, ski for cross-country skiing and Biathlon, as well as snowboard for ski jumping.  These breakthroughs solve the problems of manual operation dependence, high labor intensity, low precision, and low efficiency that China’s ice and snow equipment processing enterprises are faced with. It turns the original rough processing and grinding into a wholly automated process featuring digitalization and intelligent delicate grinding.

The equipment can tailor the most appropriate contour curve for athletes according to their movement characteristics, which realizes the leap of grinding accuracy from millimeters to microns; instilling ‘technological energy’ in the Chinese athletes of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.

Digital Twin Training System

Smart bobsleigh track digital dashboard

Bobsleigh, known as "F1 on Snow", is the fastest and the most furious event in the Winter Olympics. If the speed is too fast, there will be a risk of "flying" off the track; if too slow, the game will be a less competitive and spectacular sports. This realizes the question, “How to help athletes slide faster and more safely?”

The national key development project concerning the smart bobsleigh track, led by HUST, achieves intelligent perception with accuracy and data fusion of bobsleigh sports through the construction of the track digital twin system. This very technology achieves a perfect balance between safety and enjoyment of the game.

The project team and the national team carried out in-depth communication around the key technologies and supporting methods of digital training, explored the research and implementation path based on the sliding rules and winning factors of digital tracks with digital and intelligent technologies. They also made several auxiliary training technical achievements including "wearable bobsleigh digital dashboard", "steel frame bobsleigh training and race taxi trajectory data analysis report", "bobsleigh visual trajectory correction system" and others. The intelligent and accurate perception of the high-speed sliding process of bobsleigh movement is fused with data, and the theoretical trajectory is compared with the actual sliding trajectory to achieve visual correction training based on the digital track.

Virtual interaction guidance technology for complex spaces

Smart service of Beijing-Zhangjiakou high-speed railway - AR visual navigation program interface in Beijing Badaling Great Wall Station

To ensure Beijing’s place in history as a competent "City of the Two Olympics", the project team of the Institute of Engineering Management of HUST realized the AR visual navigation in the Beijing Badaling Great Wall Station, which is located inside the mountain. The project solved the problems of enclosed underground space positioning and path planning through the capture of the digital model of the station combined with the change of the status of the on-site facilities, the dynamic passenger flow distribution, and the three-dimensional path connection. Two technologies are used in this program: portable mobile integration and dynamic image superposition method based on AR and the dynamic virtual interactive guidance technology of multi-layer spatial environment adaptation.

While facilitating the travel of passengers during the Winter Olympic Games, it has enhanced the sense of science and technology and interest of the special high-speed rail, demonstrating the technological changes of this historic railway.

Generic-scene modeling technology under complex mountain conditions

Site space reconstruction under complex mountain conditions

Given the current situation of the experience gap in the design and construction of the Olympic standard snow competition venues, the project team of HUST developed rapid mountain scene reconstruction technology for the areas where the National Sliding Centre, National Alpine Skiing Centre, , and alpine ski jumping are located. Based on the conventional scene reconstruction algorithm, an efficient bundle adjustment optimization algorithm that integrates inertial navigation information and visual information is established for large-scale complex scenes. It effectively alleviates and avoids the problem of error accumulation, and improves the overall performance and accuracy of modeling, which satisfies the need for "one map for the venues in the competition area" proposed by the Olympic Organizing Committee.

Passive thermal face protection technology

Tests in the Winter Olympics test laboratory

To make up the technical gap of face protection equipment for cross-country skiing and achieve efficient sports protection for athletes in extremely cold environments, the project team of Wuhan National Research Center for Optoelectronics of HUST undertakes the passive thermal face protection project and is committed to providing technical support for the Winter Olympic Games.

In the absence of any foreign-related technology to refer to, the face shield, which can provide "warm" and "fast" protection for cross-country skiers dressed in light clothing in a rather cold environment, fully reflects the originality of the technology breakthrough from scratch. It can reduce the discomfort of athletes in the pre-race warm-up, reduce facial and respiratory injuries, and reduce the uncomfortableness of low temperature during the competition through the effective thermal regulation of the local micro-environment, and minimize the impact of the extreme environment on the performance.

So far, a total of eight batches of face protection equipment have been provided to the national cross-country skiing team, providing the necessary passive thermal protection for the face, respiratory tract, neck, etc. during sports in cold environments, which can assist athletes to better complete training and competition tasks.

Written by: Hu Zhenxiang

Edited by: Li Ruiyao, Scott, Jiang Jing