Testing of snowboards on the slopes is expensive and time consuming, so we wanted to simulate the experience in the laboratory. We designed and built a robot that mimics a human rider from the knees down. Four pneumatic actuators can provide up to 300 pounds of force each at the "heel" or "toe" of each "leg" attached to the board like a standard binding. The base rocks back and forth to simulate crossing the fall line on the slopes. We control the operation through a Visual Basic program that allows us to manually control the force on each actuator or run through pre-programmed scenarios. With this robot we can successfully mimic the operations conducted by a human rider; and, in fact, we can do more because we can lift the board to put it in pure torsion.

A common problem in doing laboratory testing of human operations is determining the actions of the human. For example, a rider cannot tell us how much force he applies to perform a turn or a jump. We iteratively ran the robot through scenarios on the same snowboards used in testing until we got similar behavior on the sensors. That gives us reasonable confidence that we are adequately simulating the behavior. This is the profound advantage of using robotics for testing the equipment.

We also were concerned about the effect of fatigue on a snowboard. We built a fatigue tester that repeatedly applies a force at the center of the board while a sensor measures the displacement. We then can flex the board through thousands of cycles and document any fatigue effects.