Cowboy Ingenuity: PBR leans into AI to time Team Series rides
With the bull riding talent as good as it's ever been, PBR is ensuring its timing procedures are crystal clear.
PUEBLO, Colo. – Artificial intelligence has come to PBR, and no, it’s not the mechanical bull variety.
Debuting in Kansas City, Missouri, this weekend, timing each out in the PBR Camping World Team Series has gone high tech with a new AI technology called “SkyStart.”
Developed internally, showing that cowboys can geek it up with the best of the Lab Coats, SkyStart uses advanced vision recognition from a camera mounted above the bucking chutes to capture the precise moment of the beginning of each out.
Instead of a judge relying on his eyes and reflexes to manually start the clock when seeing the bull break the plane of the bucking chute, AI takes over, eliminating human response times to make ride start times precise and consistent.
That’s the beginning of the out. For the end, SkyStart will also be used to settle challenges and close calls.
When a rider loses the rope or touches the ground, the video frame showing that exact moment is marked from among 10 camera angles recording 40 frames per second.
SkyStart automatically calculates the elapsed time between the start and ending frame, producing a foolproof time duration for the out. Each frame is timestamped with accuracy to the millisecond.
“The first fundamental rule of bull riding is it’s 8 seconds,” said Casey Lane, General Manager of the Arizona Ridge Riders and an early advocate of technology-based timing.
“The human latency factor in when to start the ride has impacted rodeo forever. We got to the point where we were timing the end of the ride to the thousandths of a second but not the start. Using this AI technology to develop a consistent start for every out gives the judges the opportunity to be more accurate and consistent, and that helps the entire sport.”
AI might not be so great at producing humor, sarcasm, or poetry. But for timing objects in motion, no matter how good human judges are, the computer will always win.
“While the PBR judges are the best in the world and have demonstrated their skill for 30 years, SkyStart takes all human reaction time out of the equation,” said Jon Sager, PBR’s SVP of Information Technology.
“The result is the most accurate time in sports and creates unbridled fairness between the PBR athletes.”
Along with Sager, SkyStart was spearheaded by Stephen Jester, Technical Director-Production Manager for the Pendleton Whisky Velocity Tour, and software developer Igor Vishnevskiy of PreciseAI (pictured below).
Additionally, Jim Palermo was instrumental in camera design and in-arena set up.
The technology debuting in the PBR Camping World Team Series will be used in the Unleash The Beast and considered for other tours and internationally.
PBR may also offer the technology to other sports as well, with track and field and auto racing as potential customers.
Because SkyStart is vision based, there are no physical sensors required, widening its potential applications.
For now, PBR has significantly upgraded its timing system to ensure fairness across every out.
“We are incredibly proud that SkyStart was developed in house, once again showcasing the innovative sport and extraordinary talents of the cowboys of PBR,” said PBR CEO and Commissioner Sean Gleason.